WTB: PHP Support for Google App Engine

Google has a history of releasing cool developer tools in addition to their web applications like Gmail. The latest developer tool out is Google App Engine.

Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it’s ready to serve your users.

You can serve your app using a free domain name on the appspot.com domain, or use Google Apps to serve it from your own domain. You can share your application with the world, or limit access to members of your organization.

App Engine costs nothing to get started. Sign up for a free account, and you can develop and publish your application for the world to see, at no charge and with no obligation. A free account can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month.

During the preview release of Google App Engine, only free accounts are available. In the near future, you will be able to purchase additional computing resources.

Goodie goodie, the only problem is it doesn’t support PHP and one must use Python. Python is great and all, but PHP IS the most popular web programming language … so what gives? If you are interested in PHP support for the Google App Engine, visit this thread at Google Code and say so. Google has always been great at giving people what they want and if enough people ask for it, hopefully they’ll do the right thing and deliver.