John Coggin, user experience expert, joins KDA Web Technologies

Designer, developer and user experience expert John Coggin joins KDA with more than two years experience working with some of Google’s largest enterprise customers.

Using PHP with MySQL on Google App Engine and Google Cloud SQL with file and database support

There was a post on the Caucho blog on the 12th of December about using their open source Quercus project to run PHP code on Google App Engine (GAE):

http://blog.caucho.com/2012/12/06/quercus-on-google-app-engine-20/#more-1100

This post lists several new tools that Quercus now provides, including:

• reading from and writing to files using Google's files-like API to store data on Google Cloud Storage using native file operations (i.e. the application doesn't know that what it's writing to "disk" isn't a disk at all)
• run SQL code on Google Cloud SQL with pdo_ and mysql_ functions mapped to Google Cloud SQL functions

These are very exciting new tools available to the PHP community to run PHP applications on Google App Engine with database support provided by Google Cloud SQL.  

Finally, as a proof of concept, the article demonstrates how to run the latest version of Wordpress on Google App Engine.

Quercus is provided by Caucho as Free / Open-Source Software solution; the package and examples can be downloaded from: https://github.com/diablonhn/quercus_on_gae_2

-- Wes Dean, a Google Apps Certified Deployment Specialist and a Google Apps Trusted Tester, is Principal of KDA Web Technologies, a Google Apps Authorized Reseller. To learn how Wes and KDA Web Technologies can help you, go to http://www.kdaweb.com/.

A question on Google Sites

Over the weekend, somebody posted a question in a forum that I thought was interesting.

They said that they wanted to use Google Sites to host a web site, but their organization's systems administrator said that Google is quite experimental and they frequently ditch services (such as iGoogle and Google Buzz)..  the administrator recommended that alternative hosting solutions should be considered instead.

This person was curious to know if these statements were true or not and whether or not Google Sites was a long-term viable hosting solution.