SANTA CLARA, Calif.–Google has announced general availability of its preview of PHP on Google App Engine.
At the ZendCon 2013 conference here, Peter S. Magnusson, a Google engineering director, announced during a keynote that the offering, initially announced in limited preview at Google I/O in May, is now available to the general public. Magnusson also said Google was providing a $2,000 starter pack for every ZendCon attendee.
Magnusson made the announcement at the ZendCon PHP conference, ensuring attendees that PHP is “an authority” on the Google App Engine platform. PHP is the fourth language runtime on Google App Engine.
“Today we’re moving to Preview, making PHP on App Engine available for everyone immediately,” said Andrew Jessup, a product manager at Google in an Oct. 8 blog post. “It is no longer necessary to whitelist your application for deployment.”
Jessup notes that PHP is one of the world’s most popular programming languages for Web programming today. Moreover, since the runtime was launched at Google I/O earlier this year, thousands of developers around the world have started using App Engine for PHP, taking advantage App Engine’s legendary scalability and ease of use to run popular PHP products like phpMyAdmin, Drupal and phpBB and frameworks such as Laravel, Silex and CodeIgniter, he said. “And as you would expect, you can use Google APIs such as Drive and Google+ on App Engine,” he added.
Jessup also noted that since introducing the PHP runtime, Google has made many improvements, including:
· Releasing a plugin for WordPress on Google App Engine
· Improving the ability to easily read and write files from PHP on App Engine
· Adding support for several important runtime extensions such as mbstring and mcrypt
· Adding support for App Engine Task Queues and Modules
· Substantial improvements to our developer SDKs
· Numerous performance and stability improvements
One early adopter of App Engine for PHP was VICE.com, which runs the popular Motherboard blog. Motherboard receives millions of visitors a month, and runs on a long-serving in-house CMS powered by the popular Yii PHP framework, Jessup said.
“It’s never been easier to develop, test and deploy your App Engine PHP application,” Jessup said. “If you work in the cloud, you can create, test and deploy your project from your browser using DevTable or CodeEnvy cloud IDEs. If you prefer working from your desktop, you can now build, locally run and debug, and deploy Google App Engine PHP applications right from within JetBrain’s PHPStorm IDE.”