In the Holiday Episode, there was some talk about Google hurting Java
with some of its projects like App Engine. I don't think this is
really a fair criticism. I agree that the current sandbox can be a
little annoying. But App Engine doesn't hide the fact that it is a
restricted environment. Users should not be surprised that they are
not allowed to spawn new Threads, or that libraries that rely on
Threads may not work. Anyone choosing to use App Engine is making a
conscious trade off - they are giving up certain classes/functionality
in order to gain (mostly) automatic scalability and relatively little
sysadmin work. To me this is just a more extreme version of coding
with things like Servlets or EJB's, where we agree to follow certain
restrictions in order to leverage some container's existing
functionality. (And App Engine runs bytecode, so I am able to use
Scala!)
I would much rather have the current situation than have my app
crippled when some newb writes something like:
while(true){
new MyThread().start()
}
Since releasing the java SDK, the appengine team has added classes to
the whitelist. I imagine they will continue to do so whenever
possible.
And as far as GWT goes, I'd much rather be using a subset of Java to
be writing my web UI than an arbitrary non java language. (or worse
yet, a proprietary google language) Don't get me wrong, I'd love it
if GWT could compile arbitrary byte code to javascript, as then I
could use Scala for that too :-)
-peter
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