Adding Perl Support to Google App Engine

I was asked the other day to help setup a website for our elementary school's PTA. I thought for a while about the various free services available vs. virtual hosting and finally wound up going with Google Apps.

You might be wondering what this has to do with Perl. Well one of my quirks, is that I tend to alternate between adding perl or linux to my google searches whenever I want to find a decent dialog on a topic. Guess what turns up with a search on: google + apps + perl?

Apparently about 9 months ago, Stephen Adkins, Dean Arnold, Brad Fitzpatrick, Artur Bergman, Chia-liang Kao, Yuval Kogman, Jonathon Rockway, and others were working on a Perl App Engine implementation for Google App Engine. It looks like it stalled.

But maybe with your help, and a show of support, we can get them to pick it up again. On the "Open Issues" list for Google App Engine, the top 3 requests are adding support for PHP, Ruby, and Perl. You can express your preference for Perl support by going to the "Open Issues" list, finding issue #34, and selecting the star beside it.

At the time I'm writing, Perl is about 300 votes behind Ruby and about 1,000 behind PHP.

Update: As of Sat. May, 23rd at 10:19 EST, Perl has almost closed the gap with Ruby by half. The current votes are:

• PHP: 2055
• Ruby: 1558
• Perl: 1396