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Introduction to PHP5
Yet Another OO Fanatic writes "PHP core developer Sterling Hughes has a excellent presentation (mirror) about PHP5 online. So far it seems to be the best coverage of the new features in PHP5; highlights include the new object model, namespaces, interfaces, access control and exceptions. Java by any other name..."
Doesn't scale? I guess someone had better tell Yahoo.
jason
jason
Have a good day?! Impossible! I'm at work!
One of the things I find fascinating when I compare the two at a system capability level is that they are equally capable. It's just that PHP is so much more easy to use, whereas Java is so much more orthodox. Easy to use often wins over orthodox.
In the long run PHP has as much chance to be a Java killer as .NET does. In the great battle for free vs. proprietary software do I really need orthodox?
You don't know how yahoo uses php. It might use it on command line for generating static pages. So beware what you think they are doing. You never know.
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
I was going to provide a quick and simple response. Then I decided to not get involved. Then I reread your post and couldn't help myself.
I'm going start out by getting to the point: Java is not the answer to everything. Not everything should be judged using Java as the standard. And finally, PHP is good enough for yahoo? Seems so: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-963937.html?tag=lh
In the interest of full disclosure: I am a full time senior level architect/programmer for one of the largest mortgage companies in the country. Most of the work I do is C# with an XML+XSL frontend these days. I won't touch any Microsoft product for my own personal projects, so in my spare time I do a lot of C++, Ruby, Perl and PHP work. I've long since given up dealing with Java, although there are Java projects (such as Struts, Cocoon, and JBoss) that I deeply respect.
I don't even like PHP, but it gets the job done. It gets it done far quicker and far easier than Java and most other languages, and I've long since learned that worse is often better (ask the Lisp community if you don't know what that phrase means).
To start, I want to point a major flaw in your arguments: Most of these PHP sites are written by amateurs plain and simple. Even a lot of the bigger PHP projects on freshmeat are clearly created by people who do not have a wealth of knowlege, but in it's place have a lot of dedication. That's fine. In fact, that's the way it should be.
The web was built via the back breaking work of millions of amateurs around the world. These people have just as much right to participate in this medium as us professionals do. Without them the web would be a desolate wasteland of holier than thou illuminati. Instead it's a rich and beautiful medium of communication supported by everybody.
"I gave up... using shared memory was too tricky and isn't even platform independent. It's not part of the core language, and even if it worked, it would not turn PHP into an application. It still runs in a modular fashion."
Why aren't you using the session? PHP has supported sessions for sometime now. There's no reason for you to be touching shared memory in a language like PHP. Would you do the same in a JSP page? I think not... Maybe you have your reasons, and PHP session handling is certainly not perfect in all situations, but your lack of an explanation as to what you are doing leads me to believe you either did not explore all possibilities, or you are making judgements based on older versions of PHP that are simply not valid anymore.
For very simple things, that don't need to scale, both in usage, and codebase, then PHP is ok. But for design real web applications, which need to be managed by more than a few developers, integrate with legacy systems, implement a full three tier architecure, etc, PHP just doesn't cut it.
Please excuse my english: 3-tier architectures are overrated overrused bullshit. Everybody has a different meaning for them, everybody has a different use for them. The only successfull n-tier architectures I have seen (and this comes from years of distributed COM+ development experience) are those that follow this structure:
Client -> Provider -> Scarce Resource
Where client is typically the web browser, the Provider is typically your web server, and the Scarce Resource is typically your database.
Breaking that into more tiers is imho absolutely foolish. The extra code complexity introduced, the marshalling overhead, latency overhead, thread synchronization issues, deployment issues, and security considerations are simply NOT WORTH IT! Why? Because the ONLY thing that really matters in the long run are your scarce resources!! That's your database! If you minimize calls to your scarce resources, you will get MUCH better bang for your buck than through any other medium. You can always throw some smart caching in there somewhere, but caching is NOT the same as adding an extra