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PHP Succeeding Where Java Has Failed
ficken writes "Web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen recently announced his prediction that PHP will be more popular than Java for building web-based applications." From the article: "Wooing programmers is nothing new in the computing industry, where players constantly jockey to establish their products as an essential foundation. Indeed, many credit Microsoft's success to its highly regarded programming tools, which make it easier for developers to write software that run on Windows. PHP has caught on widely. About 22 million Web sites employ it, and useage is steadily increasing. About 450 programmers have privileges to approve changes to the software. Major companies that employ PHP include Yahoo, Lufthansa and Deutsche Telekom's T-Online." Meanwhilie, Piersky writes "Zend has announced its rival to .NET and J2EE, with the Zend PHP Framework. In a press release, they stated that it will be 'A Web application framework which will standardize the way PHP applications are built. The Zend PHP Framework will accelerate and improve the development and deployment of mission-critical PHP Web applications'. This will for part of Zend's PHP Collaboration Project"
I'd be afraid to repeat anything that putzfuck said.
:p
This guy lucked out ONCE in his life, and everything else he touches turns to shit.
PHP rocks. Pure and Simple.
Why make claims it's going to replace anything, or succeed where anything else has failed. What possible value could this have?
Opinions are like assholes: everyone's got one, and they all smell.
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
This is the reason I think the whole comparison is unfair - PHP should've been compared to ASP.NET or any one of the bazillion Web UI frameworks of Java(Spring,Struts, Tapestry,JSF whatever).
However, the real strength of these systems is not in themselves; they are built on a superb platform base which provides Threading, IO, Networking, Graphics, Db access, i18n,and all the things a programmer might ever require. PHP doesnt have anything remotely similar, as far as i can see.
Now, to qualify this - I don't know PHP - it may very well have the problems I'm about to describe.
.NET 1.1, and let me tell you, program lines in Java or C# are a dirt-poor indication of program complexity. Why? Because it is totally impossible to write well-structured code in those languages. Before the generic-enabled versions of those languages, the simplest operations would require writing heaps and heaps of redundant classes. They're just stripped down arithmetic combined with the bare minimum components of OOP, with a spray-gloss of C-like syntax that makes coders think they're smart.
But I've used a lot of Java 1.4 and
You know why these languages have so many "architects" and books on patterns and layouts and whatnot involved? Why they have code-generators and UML toolkits and all that jazz? Because they're too clumsy to stand up on their own without them.
Your 70k-line Java program would be 50 very legible lines in Plone. The reason that Java and C# succeed is not because of the god-awful languages, but the excellent IDEs and libraries that they come with.