> I understand that you are upset that your appengine bill might go up > 4X, but how do you jump from this to the conclusion that "Google > should support PHP"?? Every application development platform needs developers. iOS, AWS, Facebook, Win32, MacOS,.... And each platform provider comes up with a a strategy to acquire developers. Apple did that via steller products backed with millions of dollars of ad budgets. AWS revolutionized regular hosting company operations by adding ability to bring servers up and down at an instants notice. This attracted corporate users who could put java, and startups that could PHP. Msft got developers by tight bundling of products, where one feeds the other.
What was the plan for AppEngine? None in my opinion. AppEngine put Python out first, which was clearly not developers choice at that time. And second one to come in was Java, where google thought they will get the enterprise customers and resulting big money. However, as everyone has discovered, corporates are not yet prepared for paradigm shift in programming that AppEngine offers and would very much prefer a server based model that EC2 offers. And besides that, no support desk to call 24X7 pretty much kills any corporate interest. As a result corporate customers are really locked out for AppEngine. As for Python, there are not many startups looking to take this path 'cause lack of developers is going to cause long term hiring issues. Going by numbers, if we look at the Bug Tracker for AppEngine - http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/list , number 1 request is "PHP Support is a must" with 3143 votes(approx 50% more votes than feature #2). In my opinion, Google should have never ignored developer opinion. Instead, AppEngine team should have recognized the demand and delivered the feature. And now 3 years down the line, AppEngine has added support for GO instead, which has pretty much no developers. As compared to that, if they had added support for PHP, there would have been thousands of more developers on the platform, generating more revenues for AppEngine, and the team not getting forced to make such drastic pricing changes. Besides that, from what is seems to me, someone with mindset of Google Apps or even Search Product is making decisions for AppEngine, where each developer is treated like a user. As a result strategy/thinking is that features can be flipped right before our eyes without being asked for opinion or any consideration for our efforts. Personally i have been here since the days when AppEngine didnt throw the DeadlineExceededError and you were left wondering for days why that HTTP 500 is showing, and days when i was not able to delete data for 2 months since no process existed, and times when i had to pay $6k for deleting 3TB of data, and days where there are thousands of datastore timeouts resulting in user loss(without getting any refund). With all this, I would really hope AppEngine gives more consideration to existing developers. > I think you assume too much. I interpret this as a temporary salve to > keep Python developers from feeling like second-class citizens until > multithreaded Python is available. I am not assuming too much. It's simple math. Besides that, i have never seen a hosting company tell me that since PHP version x now has support for this new feature. If you implement it, its good, else we are going to change 4X for the server. Also, writing new code to support threading is okay, but modifying half million lines of production code to support threading is suicide. On Jun 29, 4:29 am, Jeff Schnitzer <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 8:34 PM, vivpuri <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Thank you for the response. I am not really confused about anything. > > Everyone has different set of experiences and resulting opinions. > > Facebook was built on PHP, and definitely started from $5 PHP/MySQL. > > I understand that you are upset that your appengine bill might go up > 4X, but how do you jump from this to the conclusion that "Google > should support PHP"?? > > > Also, i am not able to understand the logic behind charging half for > > python instances since AppEngine does not support threading as of now. > > I am a python threading noob, but going by the offer that AppEngine > > team has thrown out, it seems threading can increase performance at > > most by 2x, which is the only way you can justify 1/2 price. I find it > > hard to believe. > > I think you assume too much. I interpret this as a temporary salve to > keep Python developers from feeling like second-class citizens until > multithreaded Python is available. > > Jeff -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.
