As you have probably heard Google has launched its marketplace for google apps last week. The reasons why using of Google App Engine can be useful for us are: they provide free cloud hosting (yes there are big limitations though) and which is the most important – with starting marketplace it’s great opportunity to monetize your application.
So we are going to consider here possible ways to use your symfony skills with Symfony Apps Google Apps 🙂
The first thing that came on mind is using of PHP on Java environment. Here is a brief overview of such technologies:
http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/run-php-on-the-google-app-engine/
and another one simpler article regarding running PHP on Java:
http://symfonyhelp.blogspot.com/2009/04/google-app-engine-with-java.html
As we’ve never had a chance to look into PHP on top of Java technologies we started from Quercus and turned out that actually there were already successful attempts to run symfony with it:
http://groups.google.com/group/symfony-users/browse_thread/thread/5081f19288200a0f?pli=1
So it looks like right direction, at least that’s the first way to start using symfony project with google app engine.
Another solution (rather workaround) we’ve thought about is using separate server with your symfony project (this way you lose advantages of google app engine cloud environment) and your actual Google App software (so it’s gonna be just simple wrapper) would have to communicate with separately hosted server with main logic written on symfony (e.g. virtual/dedicated on ServerGrove or EC2 instance) through lets say RESTful mechanism.
It’s just quick thoughts regarding problem of using symfony with Google App Engine but they look workable for us. What are your thoughts?
And finally some offtopic. That’s something we’ve read this week and honestly has been VERY impressed. You may noticed last week we shared a link to NeuralMash PHP-driven Neural Network Managerю Neural theory is great thing for different kind of intelligent processes but we did know.. did not even expect that it’s possible to order neuroheadset easily now and develop own applications for it: http://www.emotiv.com/developer/. I’m honestly still under impression that it’s something from future. So do you believe this thing really works?