Did you know that you can now run PHP on Google App Engine? No, Google hasn't officially added support for PHP yet but they did just add Java support and there's an implementation of PHP in Java called Quercus. Put two and two together and, voilà, you can write PHP apps on Google App Engine. Pretty sweet.
I haven't tried it out myself (and I may never do since I am absolutely in love with Python) but Moriyoshi Koizumi reported that he got it all working using a patched version of Quercus that he calls quercus-gae.
So will this keep PHP developers happy until Google implements PHP support officially? You tell me! Leave a comment below and let us all know whether Quercus-gae worked for you and what gotchas, if any, there are to watch out for. Enjoy!
Thanks go to Roshan Abraham who alerted me to this via email today.
The How to run PHP on Google App Engine article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
Awesome – thanks for the pointer. I wonder what the performance hit is?
When Google do release PHP natively for the App Engine, it’s going to open the floodgates in a serious way. It’ll be interesting to see if/when they do it.
Quercus offers some really rad stuff and adaptations to PHP as well (if you want it to). I think I saw something a while back that allowed you to use PHP in a truly object-oriented fashion with type-safety and everything…
Don’t know if PHP on GAE is a good idea. We need more people programming in Python.
This is cool Aral.Love it.There are 2 things for me here, first PHP on JAVA and then PHP on GAE.
Keep up the good work.
My heart just skipped a beat… Why on earth would you want to use PHP when you can use Python??
I think people want to use PHP because of the possibility of running killer PHP apps on GAE. We’re just waiting until someone adapts an app like Wordpress to GAE…