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A Decade of PHP
digidave writes "It was slow to catch and a lot of people didn't get it. A lot of people still don't get it, but you can't argue with its success. June 8th, 2005 marks the tenth anniversary of PHP. Here's to ten more wonderful and exciting years."
I've made my living for the past 3 years as an independent PHP developer. I don't care what anybody thinks of PHP, it makes me money to live.
Meh.
Yes, that simple thing which is overused for learning and coding pratices. In the times when you are have to look for good perl manual, PHP manual from the very begining was perfect. That's it. And second best thing came when they added those comments for user experience.
:)
So, in any way, PHP is such thing which just works.
Congrats!
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
but procedural is a valid way to structure your apps... especially for web-based ones where that have, by nature, a page-based model and a very linear flow. you can write serious software using php4 without oop!
2 1337 4 u!
The key point you're missing is that PHP doesn't have a rigid OO structure, which is why it's popular, especially for web scripting. People don't want rigid structures if they just want to throw a page together. It also is integrated well with Apache and uses similar control functions to C/C++, so programmers can switch between the languages easily.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
You wrote an OGG Vorbis decoder in PHP? Maybe I'm missing something, but why? That doesn't strike me as a very good language to be doing such a thing in. The "PHP Way" is to leave heavy processing like that to an external library such as libogg/libvorbis. You can then use PHP as a frontend for presenting info, streaming the data, and uploading files.
:-)
I realize that PHP can be cool at times, but one has to use the right tool for the job at hand.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I think it is obvious why PHP has become so popular:
1. It is very easy to learn
2. It is easy to use (unlike ASP.NET) and relatively simple
3. The syntax is derived from C and perl
4. It is free
isn't language bigotry a pretty old joke by now
You're one of those people who don't get it. This is not a language issue. In the not-so-distant future, developers will think it crazy not to use an MVC web framework for their web applications.
Ruby on Rails just happens to be first with an elegant, easy-to-use, true-separation-of-concerns, MVC web application platform.
The Java, Python, and Perl (Catalyst) folks have seen the light and are busy working on Rails-style frameworks. Seems like the PHP community hasn't seen the need yet.
bp
quoth Frymaster, "procedural is a valid way to structure your apps... especially for web-based ones where that have, by nature, a page-based model"
This is my basic gripe with PHP. It leads the unfortunate user down a path that suggests that each page is its own island, and any attempt to modularize or componentize that is, by PHP's nature, a secondary affair.
Take, as a counterpoint, something like TTK. Here, you are presented with a programming langauge in which you write your code, and a templating system in which you write pages for display and a set of tools for connecting the two.
It's not that a good programmer can't produce a workable system in PHP alone or PHP + other langauges (PHP backed by Perl or Java or C# is quite powerful, in fact), it's just that it seems that the majority of people writing PHP are hobbled by this unfortunate presentation of the language as a "page generator", and thus most of the code written in PHP is rewrite-fodder from day one.
As a templating system, PHP is quite nice, and I'd use it where appropriate.
I've been developing website backends in PHP for 3 years, and large enterprise-scale apps for the past 1 year. It's a common misconception that PHP isn't appropriate for large applications.
It's all in how you use it. Do you hack together a bunch of pages with isolated scripts talking to html forms and databases in an ad-hoc manner? Or did you start with a solid application design model from the start and follow through with time-tested methodologies?
PHP gets a bad rep because of the large number of inexperienced developers using it with poor results. I've developed full CRM and ERP apps with it including invoicing and ticketing systems that scale beautifully and are a dream to maintain. PHP is fast, free, and easy to use.
It's the responsibility of the developers to use more mature practices when developing large apps- and to recognize the fact that small site admin areas often evolve into larger apps. Plan and design!