App Engine's language bonanza

It's been a week since Google announced Java support for App Engine and the early results are very promising.

The first example is from Google, who has created an interactive shell (REPL — Read-eval-print loop) for many languages capable of running on top of the Java Virtual Machine. Current supported languages are Java (via beenshell), Lisp (via Clojure and Scheme), Groovy, JavaScript, Python, Ruby and Scala.

Multiple languages in the same session is cool, but is it useful?
(Credit: Chris Duckett/ZDNet.com.au)

In a similar vein, another party has decided to get PHP working on top of App Engine. Instructions on how to get this working with Quercus, a Java implementation of PHP, are available here.

This is the power of Google selecting Java for implementation on App Engine, as there are many languages that already run on the Java Virtual Machine. By choosing Java, Google just got all those other languages for free.