The following article originally appeared on JavaAdvent 2012.

It’s been a 3.5 years ago to this day since I last wrote about running Quercus on Google App Engine (GAE). The article detailed a crazy experiment to get a PHP application, Wordpress, running on GAE. I still remember it being a painful experience because of number of changes I had to make to Wordpress to get it working. It was all due to the GAE Java environment being so drastically different from what Java developers were used to. It was heavily sandboxed and had no SQL support. You couldn’t launch new Threads. You couldn’t write to the file system. But those were the tradeoffs you had to live with if you wanted to deploy your application to the all-wonderful Cloud.

Fast-forward to 2012 and GAE has come a long way. GAE now allows you to spawn new Threads (currently in beta). You still cannot write to the file system, but for all it’s worth there is a new GAE Files API that gives you file-like concepts. And you can run your very own MySQL instances on Google’s infrastructure (albeit Google’s customized version of MySQL).

What hasn’t changed over the years is that you’re still expected to hit major roadblocks as you migrate your existing web applications over to GAE. And you’ll have to make heavy modifications to your application to 1) make it work and 2) be performant on GAE.

So this is where Quercus comes into the picture. At Caucho, we spent a lot of time getting Quercus to work seamlessly with GAE. Our goal was to abstract the GAE details away so that developers don’t have to worry about the fact that the application is running on GAE. Things just work transparently behind the scenes for PHP applications. For example,

• PHP file_*() functions work just like they do before (including writing to files!)
• PHP mysql_*() functions and PDO work just like they do before

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Ever since Google App Engine (GAE) supported Java, it has opened a slew of other languages that GAE indirectly and unofficially supports. PHP is one of them through Quercus, our 100% Java clean-room implementation of the PHP language.

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We use WordPress for this blog and I recently upgraded to the 2.7.1 version. The developers have started using a .htaccess file with Apache mod_rewrite rules, so we need to emulate that to support certain things like permalinks. This is a quick and trivial example, but it gives a glimpse at our new rewrite dispatch syntax in Resin 4.

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This weekend’s WordCamp was really quite impressive. I wasn’t sure what to expect, having never been before, but I learned about a lot of interesting technologies and development strategies. It was so inspiring in fact, that I forgot to blog about it because I was upgrading to 2.6.1 and installing plugins yesterday.

I gave a talk on running WordPress with Quercus (slides here), which was well received for being the presentation right after lunch. Even so, there’s still a lot of work to do for us to improve the understanding of both the PHP and Java communities about what Quercus offers. One of the things I realized after the presentation is that I didn’t really show exactly how this could affect the WordPress user on the street.

During my presentation, I talked a lot about the joining together of the Java and WordPress communities. What does this actually mean if you’re a WordPress user though? Well, whether you know it or not, there’s a chance that you’ve already been reading blogs written in WordPress, running on Quercus (other than this one :-)). WordPress-related jobs are already appearing and will probably be increasing in number, so if you’re a WordPress user who’s thinking about going pro, it might be useful to you to get familiar with running WordPress on Java. There are some really big sites that are Java centric, who want to use WordPress. You could be the one to help them do it.

I’ll be giving a talk at this week’s WordCamp in San Francisco on using WordPress with Quercus. Of course this site uses WordPress on Quercus, so we’re happy to get a chance to talk with other WordPress users. Are you running WordPress on Quercus? If so, let us (and the world) know!

If you’re interested in Quercus or WordPress or both together, come on out to WordCamp this Saturday.