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."

Comments

Re:Congratulations are in order!

[quinto2000]

there are several classes, including the PEAR DB class, that provide a DB abstraction layer.

Re:Good for them.

[generationxyu]

PHP is the best choice for all php programming.

You're absolutely right. I tried to do my PHP programming in BASIC once. Bad idea.

Congratulations PHP

[GnuVince]

You've done such a wonderful job that it's time you stop now and let something better take over :)

PHP vs JSP

[SamSeaborn]

Congrats to PHP for its success, but I'm one of those who doesn't get it.

I tried PHP, but I didn't feel it gave me the rigid OO structure and sophisticated APIs I get from Java, JSPs & Servlets.

Not trolling, just saying I'm surprised that Java and Servlet hosting isn't as popular as PHP. I'm obviously missing some key point.

Sam

Re:PHP vs JSP

[Frymaster]

I tried PHP, but I didn't feel it gave me the rigid OO structure and sophisticated APIs I get from Java, JSPs & Servlets.

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!

Thanks for the career, PHP!!

[ylikone]

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.

Student Suspended Over Suspected Use of PHP

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

http://bbspot.com/News/2000/6/php_suspend.html

One of pillars of success: manual

[Pecisk]

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! :)

Re:Congratulations are in order!

[AKAImBatman]

Dude, you need to provide links. I had to *gasp* Google it! ;-)

For others, PEAR can be found here:

PEAR Class Repository

The Database classes of PEAR appear to be documented here:

Database Package

Looking over the DB classes, it looks like they provide a fairly decent abstraction. Thanks Quinto, that will definitely be nice for future PHP projects. :-)

PHP definitely does not follow the KISS principle

[Peter Cooper]

PHP has long followed the KISS principle

Are you smoking crack? PHP is more inconsistent than any other language I've encountered. I'm not disrespecting the team, as I'm sure they've worked hard, and it's great to celebrate ten years of an admittedly very useful language, but PHP is not an inherently easy language.. it's just one that lets you code sloppily and get away with it.

For a start, PHP functions seem to have no consistency at all. Sometimes you get verb/object, sometimes object/verb. Sometimes you get underscores, sometimes you don't. Consider.. is_object but isset. str_rot13 but strpos. php_uname but phpversion. There are hundreds of these. It's the reason I could never learn PHP, it's like learning Chinese, but I found Perl (and now Ruby) easy due to their relative consistency. Sometimes PHP uses "to", sometimes it uses "2".. huh what's that about?

Unlike Perl which has a few regular expression constructions and a handful of modifiers.. PHP has a whole glut of regular expression functions which have confusing names, some of which take certain modifiers, and some that don't. As someone who has mastered Perl's regular expressions I find it a major struggle when I have to tackle something in PHP (I admit, I've never 'learned' PHP, but I find it a very hard language to make quick fixes on for other people.. compared to, say, C, VB or Python, languages I don't know intimately but can easily hack).

PHP has thousands of core functions.. nuts! And why does PHP have such a bizarre lack of abstraction? PHP often has about 10 functions compared to other languages' single function.. with each of the 10 doing a slightly different thing. When it comes to being overly wordy and inconsistent, I doubt anything can beat PHP, but, well, I'd like to see someone bring up a language that is!

So if you were going to call any language "KISS", it'd be Ruby or Python.. but PHP? No way.

Success of PHP easy to understand

[iJed]

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

It's how you use it...

[sherriw]

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!