Zend Taking PHP In the Wrong Direction?

dvanatta writes "Is Zend taking PHP in the wrong direction? Ian Felton asks 'Why is PHP become more like Java, when the PHP developer community seems to want anything but that to happen? What is Zend thinking?'" From the article: "Data from a Zend survey completed in June 2003 (when PHP5 was still in major development) showed that the characteristics of the PHP community didn't necessarily match up with what was developed in PHP5. For example, with the ability to list three primary programming languages, only 18% of respondents named Java."

Comments

I *like* the OO.

[drdink]

This article was a bit vague on the survey used to justify the entire article. Who were the people surveyed? Are they just people throwing up private websites, or are they people designing applications and featureful sites in PHP? I have written and currently maintain a fairly large project that uses PHP5's OO features quite extensively. The object oriented features are what makes PHP5 so great. It is easy to design and reuse code. I look forward to it being extended and expanded, assuming it maintains compatibility.

Re:I *like* the OO.

[kawika]

PHP is seductive because it does let relatively inexperienced users generate dynamic content without too much of a learning curve. But from the description you give I think you are part of a very small minority of PHP developers at the other end of the spectrum.

My own PHP experience is more like this. Perhaps that's because I had come from Perl, and as this comparison makes clear the two certainly don't have the same ideas about how builtin functions should be designed.

As it evolves, PHP isn't solving the higher-level problems. It is merely reinventing functions, object models, and syntax. Zend's focus on things that real users don't care about may reflect that as well.

For example, PHP makes it trivially easy to insert dynamic content here and there into a page. If you want to separate business logic from presentation, which is almost manditory on a large site, you will want some sort of templating package. You will have to write your own. This is a common need, why shouldn't the core language address it? Because they are too busy reinventing object oriented programming?

Re:I *like* the OO.

[lphuberdeau]

They survey was open to public a few months ago. There were no requirements to participate. I guess anyone seeking around the PHP world at that time could have participated. Are the results representative? Maybe.

With a better object model, PHP 5 does not only bring the capacity to do OOP, but also to have better interactions with other OO libraries and languages. Interoperability really is the keyword to remember for PHP's future and Zend is putting a lot of efforts that way. Other than the object model, the key features of PHP 5 are:

• New XML library, fully DOM compliant
• New SOAP extension
• New XML-RPC extension
• Unified database API (PDO)

An extension to use Java object has been available for quite some time but it seems they are improving it and .NET extension is experimental too.

These features sure don't aim the average PHP user who simply uses include and a few conditions. I don't think it means it's bad to have em. They simply bring PHP at a higher level and offer a more complete solution to the developpers.

Re:I don't get it

[hey!]

Unless you have or would like to have OO code, you really don't notice it other than some of the PHP internal functions being moved into classes.

Yes, this article struck me as a relgious rant. For example:

Zend has maneuvered PHP so that other companies who are in the enterprise software business consider it a legitimate language...

Surely, this is a good thing for PHP users, at least for their employment prospects. In any case, it sounds to me like they're following the "make simple things simple, make complicated things possible" philosophy.

WRT to Java, I'm not sure at all what the author's dislike of Java has to do with anything at all. It seems to me that having PHP as a presentation layer choice for hypertext processing in a Java system would also be a good thing.

Re:What's with the hate..

[afd8856]

I nice choice is python. Really easy to learn, really powerfull, runs on jvm (jython), has extremely powerfull web development tools (zope & plone, that's what I'm using, but there are more), is a general purpose language, meaning you won't get stuck to just webdevelopment, and is "mainstream" enough to have bindings to any major library.

I love it, so I fully recommend it. Actually, I was programming PHP for my websites until I've realized that my knowledge and experience of PHP will not be usefull in most other cases. So I've switched to python & zope and now I'm already on my 3d contract (I work for myself) using these tools. I didn't knew about drupal or xoop back then and I was dizgusted with postnuke and phpnuke (I don't remember which one is supposed to be GPL but you're not allowed to remove the credits at the bottom. Haha!)

So, if you're doing webdevelopment, do yourself a favor and visit plone.org . It might be tough learning it the first 2-3 months, but from there life is easy :)

Sorry for my "Engrish", I'm not native speaker.

Zend broke latest version of PHP

[mabu]

When we upgraded to the latest version of PHP, which also required a Zend upgrade, several of our applications wouldn't work. I have reason to believe there's a serious bug in the Zend engine which has crippled some functionality of PHP. We're still waiting for a fix so we can upgrade to a more secure version of PHP.

The Driving Force

[Ridgelift]

If such a small number of PHP users were involved with Java, what was the motivation to mimic Java's object model and move toward making PHP coupled to Java?

The Answer: MONEY.

PHP has become popular because it's easy to get started. Just cut and paste some scrap code in your HTML and you're in business. However, that same approach to building the language has led to a rat's nest of functions, without a whole lot of consistency. Although PHP's got one of the best documentations free on the web, in the long run if you scale your applications up you're going to need to put in a lot more elbow grease to make changes and maintain your code. Zend will be creating a market where maturing web applications will need the performance gains of their products.

So what's the alternative? I've been learning Ruby and the webframe work Ruby on Rails after reading a recent /. article. I'd be lying if I said it's been easy to learn. It hasn't. I'm not used to object oriented programming, and Ruby is pure OO. But even I can see at this stage of the game that Rails apps will be far easier to develop, maintain and make changes than similar code in Java or PHP. Rails still has performance hurdles to get over, but it's developing so fast that I'm sure it will match Java & PHP's speed (the framework's only been around for less than a year). Because Rails takes full advantage of the Ruby language, it's not something that will be ported to PHP or Java.

"Give 'em the razor, then sell 'em the blades" That's PHP and Java. Magically remove facial hair so you never have to shave again, that's Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

Re:Popular direction != right direction

[aled]

I guess I'm going to flamed/modded down but...

Isn't PHP the Visual Basic of this age? it's easy, it's dirty, it's quick to do simple apps.

FUD

[gabe]

This article is FUD, pure and simple.

Everything added in PHP 5 has no effect at all on the casual or professional PHP programmer. They can go about writing their code exactly as they did with PHP 4, and PHP 3. That's because the PHP Group (the folks that develop the PHP product, not Zend) work very diligently (to some peoples' dismay) on ensuring as much backwards compatibility as possible.

All of the (very useful) OOP technology added in PHP 5 will help to push PHP into the enterprise market and allow business to build large apps using PHP. It's certainly not everything the enterprise will need, but it's a start. NONE of these additions make it any more complex for a PHP 4 user. ALL of the additions help make it possible to create well-designed web applications, though.

I used to have some respect for devshed.com because they always had interesting articles. The articles were a useful resource and quite helpful. I just don't understand why they're posting whining rants like this which do not help anyone in any way. Let this guy post it on his blog and be ignored like he should be.

Sadly, this is not the first time Mr. Felton has written an article like this.