New Project Plots to Bring Perl to Google App Engine

If you've been wanting to play around with Google's App Engine, but don't want to abandon your beloved Perl in favor of Python, there's good news on the horizon. Brad Fitzpatrick of Google (and creator of LiveJournal) recently took his 20 percent time project public with the announcement of Perl-AppEngine.

The plan is get Perl implemented on Google App Engine. At the moment the project is in its infancy, but if you'd like to contribute the code is available for tinkering.

Fitzpatrick's roadmap calls for the following tools:

• Hardened Perl Interpreter: basically, we'll be statically linking in a hardened, customized libperl to a C++ application, disabling all Perl dynamic loading. Only vetted, security-audited XS modules will be allowed. Only safe Perl opcodes will be allowed. (No sockets, no ioctl, no fork, etc, etc.) To get a preview for what this'll feel like restriction-wise, check out the newly written Sys::Protect which Artur and I wrote this evening and will be continuing to develop for people's dev environments (not production).
• Protocol Buffers for Perl: we need support for Protocol Buffers for Perl. I've started on this project internally and will open source the code soon, once I have a few free minutes.
• Server: we need to write an App Engine server for testing, local development, and potentially production deployment. (Replace Bigtable with MySQL, Hypertable, Hbase, Couch DB, etc.)
• Libraries: Perl client libraries for Datastore, URLFetch, etc services. Including docs.

Then of course there's Google's end – plugging the hardened Perl interpreter into the App Engine universe. Obviously that's not something the community can do – it would need to happen from inside Google.

While Fitzpatrick admits that there's no guarantee that Google will do that, the company did say it planned to support additional languages back when it first announced App Engine.

However, on the outside chance that Google rejects the efforts of its own, another project has been created called Cloud Perl which is devoted to the use of Perl in cloud computing projects – not just Google App Engine.

If you have the mad Perl skills, head over and join the discussion.

[via O'Reilly Radar]

See Also:

• Moving Google App Engine Projects to Amazon EC2 Hosting
• Brad Fitzpatrick, The Creator Of LiveJournal, On The Long Road To Open Social Networks
• First Look: Perl 5.10 is a Pearl
• Perl Tutorial for Beginners