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Gallery 2.0 Released
uss_valiant writes "From the Gallery website: "We are incredibly pleased to announce the release of Gallery 2.0! Over three years of design and development have gone into creating the best online photo management product possible. Gallery 2.0 is the natural successor to Gallery 1, and we hope that you like what you see. Don't wait, download Gallery 2 now!" From a developers point of view, the Gallery 2 framework is particularly interesting because it's written with modern programming patterns (OOP, extreme programming, test driven development, MVC, factories, modularity, ...) in mind which is rather unusual for PHP based projects. Over 1500 unit tests ensure correct functionality and its architecture is really impressive."
You're comparing a decent templating engine (Smarty) with crap Java technology (JSPs.) Most modern Java programmers disdain JSPs and use other, better templating technologies. Try using Velocity . Requires no recompiling when you make changes and is a very very easy templating language that provides an amazing amount of power (you literally can drop items into a hashtable of VelocityContexts and then access them by using "$" notation... such as "$user.name") If you want something that will really rock your world, check out JSF or Tapestry (it turns web programming into writing an event-driven application, like desktop apps.)
The problem with most PHP applications is that they don't scale. I don't mean that in a "PHP SUXORS! YOU CAN'T WRITE S$!@ IN IT"... I mean that most PHP applications aren't built with any real caching implementations (like this gallery software, or phpbb, or nuke, etc...) and the PHP frameworks that I looked at don't really provide that functionality.
The stuff availble for Java is just so much more powerful. You have the Hibernate OR mapping package that provides an amazing amount of OR work for you, including the ability to plug in multiple transactional caches, session caches, database connection pools (including the ability to have clustered caches across multiple boxes.) You have complex messaging architectures to talk to and keep multiple machines in sync. You have great web service APIs and great search engines that can be plugged in. Stuff to that degree just doesn't exist for PHP.
It often shocks me to see so many "Enterprise Level" PHP apps released with no caching implementation... you shouldn't see ANY home page hit a database on every hit. (And yes, you can easily avoid stale content by eviction, injection routines.)
So yes, you can definitely write decent stuff in PHP. But for the highly scalable enterprise environment, the libraries and packages that exist for Java and ASP just don't exist.
The other thing I hate about PHP is that there just is no IDE that is of the caliber of Eclipse for PHP (and PHPEclipse just ain't there yet.) A professional IDE allows me to introspect objects, trace stacks, change variables on the fly per hit and control each thread individually. This kind of power makes debugging and performance testing so much easier and more powerful than a PHP app. Good luck trying to seriously profile a PHP app...
So yea, PHP has it's place. It's wonderful for quick one-offs. I just wouldn't want to code a massive user load, transactional, high availability, multiple machine cluster application on it.