Cloud Platform Blog: Google App Engine PHP Runtime now available to everyone

At Google I/O earlier this year, we added PHP, the fourth language runtime on Google App Engine in Limited Preview. Today we’re moving to Preview, making PHP on App Engine available for everyone immediately. It is no longer necessary to whitelist your application for deployment.

PHP is one of the world’s most popular programming languages for web programming today. Since the runtime was launched at Google I/O earlier this year, thousands of developers around the world have started using App Engine for PHP, taking advantage App Engine’s legendary scalability and ease of use to run popular PHP products like phpMyAdmin, Drupal andphpBB and frameworks such as Laravel, Silex and CodeIgniter. And as you would expect, you can use Google APIs such as Drive and Google+ on App Engine.

PHP vs Perl

Perl vs PHP

PHP is another computer language. In a way, Perl and PHP are competitors in the programming world. Both languages have relatively similar learning curves, work well in the server environment, and have similar overall capabilities.

As you would expect, each language has its pros and cons. Ideally the webmaster would be able to use either language and choose the best one for a given project. However most programmers have a preference for one over the other and will tend to use their favourite.

In recent years PHP has become more popular with new programmers, in particular, web designers learning their first programming language. This may be because PHP is slightly easier to learn from a web design point of view. PHP pages are constructed like HTML pages, with standard HTML markup. PHP code is inserted into the page and executed when the page is requested. Conversely, Perl scripts are run as stand-alone programs and create HTML pages when the script is run.

Another issue is speed and efficiency. PHP is generally considered to be faster than Perl, although this is debatable. In any case there are certainly ways to make Perl perform as fast. PHP supporters often cite speed as a good reason to choose PHP, but in reality it is not normally a concern and any differences are usually academic.
Perl is a very powerful, robust language with more history than PHP. Although the newbie might think that Perl is more complicated than it needs to be for web development, experienced programmers will appreciate the vast array of options available with Perl.

In our opinion....
In regard to web development, we have yet to find a single thing that Perl can't do, whereas we have found limitations in PHP. We feel that the added power of Perl makes it the better choice. We have not found the efficiency issue to be much of an issue at all - in most cases it's only academic and won't actually affect the performance of your website.
In the end, either language will be adequate for most web development requirements.

How to put a PHP Contact from in the website?

PHP Contact Form (Captcha) Installation Instructions

This method is recommended if you want to include the contact form on any existing PHP page of your website (say your existing contact page). The limitation of this method is that you can only display a confirmation message and not redirect to any specific thank you page you may have. If you would rather access the contact form as a separate page, skip to Method II. Compared to this method, Method II is bit easier to implement.
Open contact-config.php and edit the below 3 variables:

$to = 'youremail@email.com';
Change youremail@email.com to the email address where you wish the contact form messages to be delivered.
$subject_prefix = 'My Website Contact';
This will be the prefix that'll be attached to the subject of all contact form email messages.
$where_included = '';
You first have to select an existing PHP page on your website where you'll be displaying the contact form. This is the name of the file where you are including the contact form. If you don't have a PHP page, don't worry. You can simply rename your existing HTML page to PHP page. For example:
contact_us.html > contact_us.php

Note: The file where you are including the contact form and the rest of contact form files must be in the same directory.

So if you are including the contact form in a file called contact_us.php, then the above variable will be:
$where_included = 'contact_us.php';
Now open the file where you are going to include the contact form, in this case contact_us.php, and put the below code to the place where you want the contact form to be displayed:
<?php include "contact.php"; ?>
Then add the below code to the very top of the same file:
<?php session_start(); ?>


That's it! Upload all the files to your server. If you load contact_us.php, the contact form should be visible.

Note: The purpose of $where_included variable is to define the action attribute of the form tag:
<form action="contact_us.php#cform">
Setting this variable incorrectly will display the form but give an error on submitting.

Method II

This method is recommended if you want to access the contact form as a separate page and would like to redirect users to a separate thank you page you may have. You can use this method even if you don't want to redirect users to a separate thank you page.
1. Change:
$use_header_footer = FALSE;
to:
$use_header_footer = TRUE;
2. $thank_you_url = '';
Add the url to your thank you page to the above variable. Example:
$thank_you_url = 'http://www.yourdomain.com/thank_you.html';
3. Change:
$where_included = '';
to:
$where_included = 'contact.php';
Open contact-header.php and contact-footer.php and put your site header and footer information in them.
That's it! Upload all the files to your server. You can now access your contact form directly by visiting:
http://www.yourdomain.com/contact.php
or:
http://www.yourdomain.com/form/contact.php
depending on where you have uploaded the contact form files.

Modifying the Looks of Your Contact Form

To modify the looks of your contact form - background color, border, fonts, etc. please modify the variables under the "COSMETICS" section in contact-config.php file. All the variables are self-explanatory.

PHP Tutorial: Pecl vs Pear VS pecl

PHP Tutorial: Pecl vs Pear vs PECL

"Pecl is a repository of PHP extensions, while
PEAR is a repository of PHP classes.

Extensions are written in C and included into PHP, while classes are written in PHP and included into your code.