Google App Engine is a PaaS that enables you to build and host web apps on the same systems that power Google applications. App Engine offers fast development and deployment; simple administration, with no need to worry about hardware, patches or backups; and effortless scalability. With the latest Channel API it enables applications to send messages in real time without the use of polling. App engine currently only supports Python and Java and there are no PHP APIs available yet.

However, there’s a workaround to get PHP running on GAE. With Quercus, you can run PHP on JVM which is supported in GAE infrastructure. Quercus is Caucho Technology’s fast, open-source, 100% Java implementation of the PHP language. Latest version of Quercus supports PHP 5.3.2 thus features like namespace and closure in PHP 5.3 are available. You can use Java classes from PHP(with Quercus) to access various API such as Mail, URL Fetch, XMPP, Task Queues, Google Accounts on App Engine.

Here is an example of DooPHP URI routing demo running on GAE

Now, there are a few steps to get you started with Quercus and GAE.

Step 1: Download and install Resin from

Step 2: Download and install Google App Engine SDK for Java from http://code.google.com/appengine/downloads.html#Google_App_Engine_SDK_for_Java

Step 3: Download this example doophp-gae.zip and upzip it to your preferred location

Step 4: Copy resin.jar