Slides from my SDPHP Presentation on Google App Engine with PHP

1. <?php
presents
echo "Google App Engine For
PHP";
?>

2. A quick slide about SDPHP
Social and Communications:
● MeetUp: http://www.meetup.com/SanDiegoPHP/
● Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SanDiegoPUG/
● Github: https://github.com/sdphp
● Twitter: @sdphp
● IRC: freenode.net #sdphp
Website: http://www.sdphp.org/
● Mentoring Program - http://www.sdphp.org/sdphp-mentoring-program/
● PHP Resources - http://www.sdphp.org/php-resources/
● Job Listing - http://www.sdphp.org/job-listings/
Two Monthly Group Meetings (held on different days)
● Downtown San Diego
● North County - Carlsbad
Speakers welcome
and get a cool
SDPHP pint glass.

3. A quick slide about Me
Eric Van Johnson
PHP Developer and Architect and an Organizer of SDPHP
● Github: https://github.com/shocm
● LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/vanjohnson
● Twitter: @shocm
● IRC: @shocm
● Website: www.shocm.com

4. What is Google App Engine
Google App Engine (GAE) is Google Platform As A Service
(PaaS).
PaaS solutions are designed to supply a full solution stacks
"as a service".
Pros include no server administration, no patching, very
low-maintenance, and auto scaling.
Cons are that these solutions can be pretty restrictive
environments to work in.
Other PHP PaaS Solution include Engine Yard, Red Hat
OpenShift, Zend PHPCloud, and Appfog

5. History of GAE
April 7, 2008 - Google announces Google App
Engine, their new PaaS solution with support
for the Python Programming language.
April 8, 2008 - Feature request #13 was
opened up asking for PHP support
2009 - Google adds Support for Java to GAE.
This, by extension, opened the door to running
other JVM languages such as Groovy, JRuby,
Scala, Clojure and Jython.

6. More History of GAE
May 2011 (Google I/O 2011) Experimental
Support for the Google Language Go is
announced on GAE.
May 2013 (Google I/O 2013) Experimental
Support for PHP is announced on GAE. Over
3300 people had starred the original Issue #13.

7. GAE and PHP
GAE (currently version 1.8.0) runs a harden
version of the Open Source PHP 5.4 interpreter
Extensions loaded in GAE
Core, GAE Runtime Module, OAuth, PDO, Reflection, SPL, SimpleXML, apc,
bcmath, calendar, ctype, date, dom, ereg, filter, gd,
google_cloud_sql_mysqlnd_plugin, hash, iconv, json, libxml, mbstring, mcrypt,
memcache, memcached, mysql, mysqli, mysqlnd, openssl, pcre, pdo_mysql,
session, shmop, soap, standard, tokenizer, urlfetch_stream_wrapper_plugin,
xml, xmlreader, xmlwriter, zlib

8. GAE PHP Site
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/gettingstarted/introduction

9. GAE PHP SDK
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/gettingstarted/installing

10. GAE PHP Tools
GUI Version

11. GAE PHP Tools
GAE PHP uses PHP-CGI so you need to define the path to you PHP-CGI in
your configuration

12. GAE PHP Tools
GAE PHP also can be used from the command line
dev_appserver is a complete complete simulation of the GAE production
environment. GAE services such as Memcache, Task Queue, and Cron Job

13. App.yaml
GAE uses a YAML file to define a lot of the aspects of your application.
Things that can be defined in the
app.yaml file include;
● What programing engine to use
● The version of the application
● Url mapping (using regular
expression)
● Url level security (Both "login" and
"admin" roles)
● Static Directories
● Cache times of static resources
● Require HTTPS ● Libraries (Python) ● Resource Files (Java)

14. GAE Environment
GAE differs from your typical LAMP Stack. On the plus side, services like
Memcache are automagically enabled and configured for your application.
However there are also negative issues, sort of, like the fact that you do not
have access to the local file system so you are unable to write to any local file
system.

15. Google Cloud SQL
● A fully managed, MySQL 5.5 compatible
database service.
● Highly durable, highly available
● Automatically backed up.
● One Click restores
Google Cloud SQL propagates writes out to multiple datacenters.
Pricing
Interesting pricing models. You can pay for Cloud SQL on a per hour usage. You can also pay for the
service in the increments of time you are actually doing reads and writes to the database. This comes in
handy for QA and Staging environments where you may only use the database for very small amounts of
time. The Database can sit there, not being used, and you would not pay for it.
Pricing ranges from $0.10 for a million I/O to $1.46 a day up to $46.84 a day.
https://cloud.google.com/pricing/cloud-sql

16. Google Cloud SQL
Google Cloud Service supports 3 major ways
to connect to your SQL Instance. PDO,
mysql_connect, and mysqli.
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/cloud-sql/developers-guide
* deprecated

17. Google Cloud SQL
Once connected, MySQL works pretty much as
expected in PHP. The only difference is
instead of connecting to a IP address or Host,
you connect to your
project_name:instance_name
Example of a MySQL Query.
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/cloud-sql/developers-guide

18. Google Cloud Storage
● Fast, reliable, and durable
● Fine grained access control (you can
control exactly who can read and write to
each file)
● Can be used to publish public web content
● Access your files from GAE, RESTful
APIs, or Web Based GUI
The simplest way to write data to Google Cloud Storage from your app is to use
file_put_contents as follows:
$options = [ "gs" => [ "Content-Type" => "text/plain" ]];
$ctx = stream_context_create($options);
file_put_contents("gs://my_bucket/hello.txt", "Hello", 0, $ctx);
Alternatively, you could use fopen/fwrite to write data in a streaming fashion instead
$fp = fopen("gs://my_bucket/some_file.txt", "w");
fwrite($fp, "Hello");
fclose($fp);
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/googlestorage/overview

19. Memcache
GAE has zero-configuration of the memcache service out of the box in both
your local development environment as well as in the GAE Cloud environment.
This means data you need to access frequently and quickly, or data that may
be process intensive and timely to create, can be stored in memcache.
You can use the Memcache Library
$memcache = new Memcache;
$memcache->set('foo', 'bar');
print $memcache->get('foo'); //prints 'bar'
Alternatively you can use the Memcached Library
$memcached = new Memcached;
$memcached->set('foo', 'bar');
print $memcached->get('foo'); //prints 'bar'
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/memcache/?hl=en

20. Task Queue
The Task Queue PHP API allows you to run long
processes outside the scope of a user request. For
example you can schedule an email campaign as a
task.
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/taskqueue/
Mail PHP API
Applications hosted on App Engine do have
the ability to send emails on behalf of the
applications administrators or any user of the
application with a Google Account. Emails can
have attachments.
Applications can also receive emails.
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/mail/

21. Logs PHP API
You do have access to your applications logs and you can even write to your
logs by invoking the syslog() call from you application.
if (authorized_user()) {
// Some success code
} else {
syslog(LOG_WARNING, "Unauthorized access attempted");
}
The first 100 megabytes of logs data retrieved per day via the Logs API calls are free.
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/logs/
Customizing your PHP.ini file
You can include a php.ini file with your App Engine application
and override any PHP directive that has one of the following
changeable mode values:
● PHP_INI_SYSTEM
● PHP_INI_ALL
● PHP_INI_PERDIR
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/config/php_ini

22. Cron Jobs
You do have the ability to define scheduled cron jobs within your application.
cron:
- description: daily summary job
url: /tasks/summary
schedule: every 24 hours
- description: monday morning mailout
url: /mail/weekly
schedule: every monday 09:00
timezone: Australia/NSW
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/config/cron
DoS Protection Service for PHP
The App Engine Denial of Service (DoS) Protection Service
enables you to protect your application from running out of quota
when subjected to denial of service attacks by allowing you to
blacklist IP addresses or subnets
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/config/dos

23. App Engine Dashboards
Cloud Development

24. Deploying your application
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/gettingstarted/uploading
<side note>
You can also use Git to Push and Deploy
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/push-to-deploy

25. Running Multiple Environments
You can run multiple environments in one App Engine Application. You control
this by defining the correct "version" you wish to deploy to.

26. What can you do with PHP
and Google App Engine?
Custom Application?
Yes provided you are willing to work within
the limitations of the environment and
extensions.
Wordpress?
Yep, this is one of their "sample apps".
There are some limitations and a couple
really simple customizations that need to
be done. Full steps are on their web site
https://developers.google.com/appengine/
articles/wordpress
Drupal?
Yes according to the one of the presenters
and early testers at Google I/O who spoke
about using GAE PHP
Frameworks? Uncertain. Not tested.

27. DEMO TIME
IF WE HAVE
TIME ...

28. Drawbacks ...
● Very limited "Free Tier" to use.
● Lack of support for many established and popular PHP
solutions such as CMS and eCommerce Solutions.
BU$INE$$ IDEA!!!!
Customize established and popular PHP solutions such as
CMS and eCommerce solutions to run on Google App Engine

29. THANK YOU!
Eric Van Johnson
● Twitter: @shocm
● IRC: @shocm
● Website: www.shocm.com