Let Me Rephrase the Google App Engine Announcement

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The most important aspect of this year's Google Campfire was, according to the official announcement, the addition of a new language to Google App Engine. I cannot say the new language was a surprise to me as I was writing about the reasons why Java will be the next language supported on Google App Engine a couple of weeks ago.

Anyways, while watching the live stream and discussing with other watchers it came to my mind that people are still not realizing that when speaking about Java there are usually two aspects to it: the programming language and the virtual machine. Even the official announcement misses this very important aspect.

Why is this so important?

The answer is basically extremely simple: within hours after the announcement I start getting confirmation that more and more languages are actually working on Google App Engine. To this moment I've heard of at least of 6 languages: BeanShell, Clojure, Groovy, JavaScript (Rhino), Ruby (JRuby), Scala. I have left aside Jython which is just another implementation of Python which was already supported on App Engine.

So, now let me rephrase this part of the announcement:

Google App Engine is supporting now the Java Virtual Machine and any languages that run on top of it.

Clojure on Google App Engine

Here is a list of links for running Clojure on Google App Engine

Groovy on Google App Engine

Guillaume Laforge have posted an article on the SpringSource blog on writing your Google App Engine applications in Groovy.

At the moment Grails doesn't work, but I'd say this is just a matter of days now.

JRuby on Google App Engine

Ola Bini has been the first to published a very detailed tutorial on how to run JRuby on Rails on Google App Engine.


You can further track the list of the supported languages on this page.


In case you want to watch the whole Google Campfire event I have embedded below the videos: