Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Google's App Engine

Seriously, what happened? Python? I don't mean to offend anyone but why come up with this nice, huge, not to mention free, application server if all you're going to support is Python?

Now, I'm sure they are tons of people who like Python, I just happen to not be one of them. I don't like languages that are brace challenged. What's really annoying is that Google has been pushing its Web Toolkit(GWT) this last year, a toolkit that lets you write Java code for the client that gets compiled down to JavaScript so that is can execute on the client. Why is this not supported?

That being said, since GWT compiles down to static HTML and JavaScript files, it's still possible to use the client side, compiled product from Google's App Engine. The server end of the application would have to be written in Python. Furthermore, the RPC mechanism provided by GWT would need to be dismissed in favor of REST or JSON for communications.

All this to say that the top four requested features on the Google Code site for this project are support for other languages. I can understand Google not supporting Ruby, PHP and Perl. Google doesn't have any significant history with any of these languages. Java on the other hand? I just don't get it.