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The long rumored Java support for the Google Apps Engine has come to fruition.  Now, more enterprises can begin moving their infrastructure to it.  But let me ask this: is the Google Apps Engine for real or just hype that we want to think is great?

I want to say that my belief for something to become successful is that there needs to be a real market for it.  While I do think that the notion of cloud computing is great and eventually necessary, I've yet to see it expand in the job market.  What do I mean?

If you go to Dice.com, you'll notice very LITTLE demand for Google Apps Engine.  In fact, I've been tracking this for a few months and never saw beyond 1-2 job listings at a time.  Considering that the first release of Google Apps Engine has been now a year old, you would think that more people would have adopted it, considering after all it is Google we are talking about here.

Could it be that the first release under python utterly failed because so few companies support python?  I'll make this claim by showing some numbers.  Between January 22 until April 10th, not more than a little over 1000 jobs for python were present on Dice.com.  Compare that to Java which has gone between 8k-9k (and the wavering numbers have been, of course, due to the recession).  C# manages to total between 9k-10k in that period.  Perl still has a respectable 2.8k while PHP manages to hold around 1.4k.

Now, if you want to see growth for a 3rd party platform, checkout Facebook which has gone from over 60 all the way up to a little over 110.  Surely, this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison (which is more like OpenSocial which has never gotten more than 17 in this period), but it's still a form of koolaid us developers like to drink.

Still, considering the low demand for jobs using Google Apps Engine, I'm wondering if the support for Java will increase these numbers as enterprises might be more open to adapting their infrastructure?  Or are these numbers strictly for hobbyists who want to build the next ecommerce shopping cart for their pizza baker friend