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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 been doing alot of PHP Programming over the past 3 years (after doing Java for the 4 years before that) and have grown to really like the language. It's easy, you can get started in 1 evening and if you have the proper background (ie: a few other programming languages), you can understand it (at least conceptually) just about as fast. If you know what you're doing, you can write proper frameworks the way you can in any other decent programming language.
However, if you don't know what you're doing, PHP makes it easy create to a garbled mess, tangled and obtuse enough give bad perl programs a run for their money. If you have the discipline to adhere to proper abstraction and coding guidlines, it becomes a very powerful language.
True, before PHP5 the object model was lacking but this should soon be a thing of the past. It's a great fit when coding dynamic web apps. It even makes a decent shell language + once you grok the idea of (generally) typeless data, you just appreciate it for the fact that it *just*works* and that it's practical.
Java on the other hand is fussy. I don't know how many times I've gotten a compile error when I passed an 'int' to an 'Integer' argument. I know *why* it's happening but I don't care! Java forces you be (theoretically) correct and complete, which is both a good and a bad thing. PHP *allows* you to be (theoretically) correct and complete but doesn't force you to do anything.
The biggest difference is the fact that java is further along in the frameworks which are available to the language. PHP has some nice stuff scattered in many places but nothing to really compare to Apache's Jakarta.
Html and php are too hard to understand, I am having better luck with java.