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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."
Come on.. ...):
FTFLOTFA (From the first line of the
"Why is PHP become more like Java..."
Give me a break. When this site links to articles as badly written as this one, it makes lots of people feel bad. Why can't devshed and other sites (including this one) do any damn proofreading or editing?
Thanks!
Andrew
In the Zend survey, 93% of respondents listed PHP as a primary language and 69% listed HTML.
People who think HTML is a programming language really have no business setting the direction of PHP.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
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.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
I'm always puzzled by technology "insiders" writing about groups that are "destroying products" that "mainstream developers" want to use.
Reality check: "Mainstream developers" are people who a) pay nothing to use the software and b) have no product alliegiance whatsoever.
People are using PHP because it's useful and it's free. But being free doesn't help Zend in any way. They're changing the direction of the product slowly so that they'll eventually make some profit off of either PHP itself or PHP-addons using their server language / server engine.
My Philosophy: Unless you're paying for a product, or actively developing for the product, don't bitch when the people who *do* need money because they're the ones making the product decide they want to change it.
By the way, I use PHP quite a bit, and haven't really noticed that much of a difference from PHP4 to PHP5. Some small things, but nothing earth shattering.
Since when is HTML a programming language?
I haven't written anything in PHP5 yet, but from what I've seen, I wouldn't call it "complex". If they find it "complex", they should just stick to HTML.
Yeah, they may run Windows as their desktop OS, but that doesn't stand for anything. Sure, they might usually check out their newest scripts in their desktop, but they all pretty much end up in their server, which is probably running some *NIX.
So? As long as the engine doesn't become slow or very resource hungry, more features are always welcome; the new OO model might help someone write better (e.g. cleaner) PHP code. If you don't like the new OO model, then just don't use it.
What does Linus have to do with PHP? Why would be care what Linus would do, seriously? Also, about that section mentioning all Zend people driving fancy cars and stuff, and the company trying to profit. Of course it's trying to profit; it's a company! I don't know of any companies that don't have profit in mind. They make a good engine, so PHP is based on it. Are you telling me that that shouldn't have happened because Zend is a company? Think again..
My $0.02
People hate OOP, but complain about organization of code.
People hate writing the same things over an dover again themselves, but java has APIs for lots of things, so you don't have to do so.
So php is being pushed into an OOP direction, not a clean implementation, the APIs are being provided, ugly as they may be, and things were never unverbose/cryptic... so what's the problem again?
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Why is PHP become more like Java, when the PHP developer community seems to want anything but that to happen?
;-)
That's because most of the PHP programmers are uneducated writers of throw-away code. They are people who use PHP because they can make dynamic pages without needing to really learn anything; people who mix HTML and SQL; people who never bother to check for errors; people who think register_globals was a great idea, because they didn't have to type "complicated statements" like echo $_POST['somevar']; and the list goes on and on.
The most common argument I hear against PHP becoming more like Java is that now there are so many new things you need to learn. But this is not due to changes in the language making it harder to write crappy code - that's just as easy as it was before. The main reason for needing to learn new stuff seems to be the increasing number of competent programers in the PHP community who put pressure on the incompetent ones, who in turn pound their little fists on the table and cry that PHP is acquiring too many features from other languages. I'm sorry, but knowing the difference between "if" and "for" statements does not make you a programmer.
Ripping off Java is probbably the only real chance for PHP to be taken more seriously in the business world. After all, it worked for C#.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If a piece of shit flies west at 60 miles per hour, is it going in the wrong direction?
-Laxitive
without stopping any browser for 15 seconds (java) while it does its thing.
Just to clear up what seems to be a more common misconception then it should.
The author of the article is not referring to client side java (applets) but instead to server side java (jsp, servlets, j2ee). Server side java returns html just like php, perl, asp it just uses java as the processing language.
Once compiled, a JSP may actually respond faster than PHP without a compiler cache. A delay should only occur when the file is accessed for the first time. Which is usually done by the developer, though that surely makes me favour PHP over JSP. Having to wait a couple of seconds everytime you make a change sucks.
> Having to wait a couple of seconds everytime you make a change sucks.
Solution: use jikes instead of javac to recompile your JSPs. It's blazing fast. I know resin makes this dead simple, but it should be doable on tomcat. Heck, resin will even automatically recompile your servlets and EJBs, deployment descriptors and all (if you use xdoclet for them). You hardly ever have to manually rebuild. It's almost as nice as using ASP.NET.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
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.
Gabriel Ricard