Ajaxular - All Things AJAX

Michael Podrazik has written an interesting post on what the next App Engine Language will be. If you don't know about App Engine it currently supports Python and you can read more about it here.

Below is an excerpt from the post.

So how reasonable would it be to offer a hosted Java environment? While almost any hosting provider currently gives you the option of running PHP, lots of 'em give you Perl, etc. virtually nobody except boutique hosting providers let you run Java. There's a good reason for this. First of all, Java is an enterprisey language and the apps that use Java on the server side are not especially well suited to run in a shared environment. Secondly, even if the market existed, there are technical limitations that make running Java in a shared resource pool problematic. While you can chroot PHP to prevent people from accessing the shared, underlying filesystem, with Java you can spawn threads and do lots of other things that make implementing resource consumption quotas problematic. The fact that you can't just run a Java program using an Apache module or through CGI, and the fact that there tends to be a mismatch in the skill sets that *nix ops people usually have and the skill set required to effectively manage a Java app just further muddies the waters.

What you would really need is a customizable JVM that let a hosting provider limit what hosted apps are allowed to do. You may be able to do this with a locked down SecurityManager, but doing the kinds of things that Google is doing with the App Engine Python implementation would be even better. Not very many people have the chops to write their own VM. Google is one of them, and oh yeah, they've already sorta done it. Twice.

GWT is interesting in that you write your applications in Java with certain elements of the API stripped out and the compiler translates your code to JavaScript. Android apps are written in Java with certain elements of the API stripped out and the compiler translate your code to run in Dalvik. Why not do something like this for App Engine and make it a trifecta?

Google is pouring a lot of resources into Java lately and in a public way. Guice is getting lots of attention lately as a Spring competitor.

You can read the full post here.

So, the post predicts that the next App Engine Language will be Java. However, it predicts that the API will be limited. I would love to hear your thoughts on this prediction, so leave your thoughts in the comments.

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