Google’s App Engine for PHP is now out of beta and generally available on the company’s platform as a service offering. This means PHP apps are now covered by Google’s App Engine service level agreement and deprecation policy.
No matter what you think about PHP, it remains one of the most popular programming languages on the Web and thanks to projects like Facebook’s HHVM and others, it may even be getting a bit more credit in the developer community now, too.
Google launched an invite-only preview of PHP support for App Engine at its I/O developer conference in the summer of 2013 and then opened it to all developers a few months later. Even in preview, though, PHP turned out to be pretty popular on App Engine. Google says “tens of thousands of developers” have built and deployed PHP apps on App Engine and it’s currently handling about 800 million PHP queries per week.
Sony Music used the service for a quiz for One Direction Day that saw up to 9,000 queries per second (which is great of App Engine and somewhat of a bummer for those who care about music…) and Solar Impulse, the team behind the solar-powered plane that’s currently trying to make it around the world, is using the service to power its website.
Like many of Google’s Cloud Platform services, App Engine offers a free tier for developers who want to give it a try. Other languages currently supported on App Engine include Python, Java and Google’s own Go.