Running PHP on Google App Engine

By Manuel Lemos

manuellemos.net

<email contact>

Contents

* What is Google App Engine?

* Google App Engine with Java support

* Running PHP applications on Google App Engine

* Share your experiences with PHP on Google AppEngine


* What is Google App Engine?

As some of you may remember, about 1 year ago, I posted an article about Google App Engine, a cloud computing environment that Google has been working on to host Web applications in a way that, in theory, it provides automatic scalability, so sites can handle large audiences without having to plan and invest on servers to handle large loads.

phpclasses.org/blog/post/77-Google- ...


* Google App Engine with Java support

As it is explained in the article above, initially Google only provided support to run Python applications.

Meanwhile, last week Google announced the support of Java to run applications on Google App Engine.

googleappengine.blogspot.com/2009/0 ...


* Running PHP applications on Google App Engine

As some of you may be aware, thanks to Quercus project, it is possible to run PHP 5 applications on environments that have a running Java Virtual Machine.

caucho.com/resin-3.0/quercus/

A PHP developer named Roshan just reported that he successfully run a PHP application on Google AppEngine using Quercus.

phpclasses.org/discuss/blog/PHP-Cla ...

Here you may learn more details about this experience:

webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/run-php-on- ...


* Share your experiences with PHP on Google AppEngine

This is not an ideal solution because it is not native PHP support, as many of use hoped, but it is indeed some progress.

It would be interesting if anybody could share your results, specifically what are the limitations and what are the benefits of running PHP on this environment compared to traditional hosting environments.

As a side comment, PHP applications can also run wherever there is a .NET virtual machine, thanks to the Phalanger project, which by the way is sponsored by Microsoft.

php-compiler.net/

So, in theory it should be possible to run PHP applications in Windows Azure, Microsoft cloud computing environment, as it was explained in this article:

phpclasses.org/blog/post/85-What-is ...

If you have tried running PHP on these cloud computing environments, feel free to post your comments here.