Hand me the Kool-Aid :-)

It's been about a day since Java for App Engine was announced. I have secured my early test account and am looking forward to start playing with this on the weekend. I am a big fan of Java -- not because of any particular language feature but because of the great IDE support that Eclipse and other IDEs provide. It will be interesting to see how easy it is for me to ramp up, especially with GWT.

A little bit less than a year ago, I wrote on this blog

Instead of focusing on new languages, I think people should rather try working with what's out there (python) and rather request new features and APIs. Having said that: if I could wave a magic wand and have a new programming environment supported, it would probably be the JVM. Not Java per se, but the virtual machine its bytecode gets compiled to. Why? Well, it has the potential of giving us not one new language, but an entire set[...]

Over the last twelve months, the App Engine team has been incredible with providing these new features, such as memcache or remote APIs. Yesterday's Campfire was another great example, when Google opened up connectivity to the enterprise world through Secure Data Connector. What really amazed me however even more than the accomplishments of my fellow Googlers (I am sortof used to them delivering awesome stuff by now ;-)? It was all the cool things that came from third party sources, both at the presentation and in the next 24 hours afterwards. Just take a look at the JVM-based languages that people have succeeded to getting to work to a certain extent: we have

• JRuby


• Groovy


• Javascript (Rhino)


• Clojure


• Jython, Scala and BeanShell

Admittedly, some of these languages had a head start, but I am sure others will catch up (anyone working on PHP through Quercus, maybe?). Check out this incomplete list of JVM languages and see if there's something in there that interests you.

I'm looking forward to building my first App with this -- we'll see how far I get...