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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"
As a PHP coder and Java hater, I am completely in agreement with whatever the hell this article says. :D
BytesTemplar.com
... until companies who need mission critical systems have someone they can phone when something goes wrong, and some form of developer accreditation. Don't kid yourself. J2EE isn't picked because of the language, it's because it's got Sun and IBM (through Websphere) behind it.
Coke succeeding where peanuts fail.
What? The two do different things.
Don't know about you, but it sounds dangerous to me.
Doesn't PHP tend to be embedded in the page? I thought it was a more direct comparison to JSP than to Java. And like JSP I expected it violated the seperation of logic and presentation that I love so dearly. I've been avoiding PHP for the same reason I don't do JSP pages, I don't like code in the presentation layer.
I am prepared to have my mind blown here, can someone enlighten me?
Java "failed" on the desktop. I didn't know PHP desktop apps were taking over.
So I decided that I'd focus on Java for my depth. Now I read that I guessed wrong again!
Maybe I should have gone C#/.ASP.
No, Python and Zope are where it's at!
No way, Ruby is the way to go. Arrrgh!
About 22 million Web sites employ it
Well, of course. PHP works for free.
Wondering where the '22 million web sites' comes from? http://www.php.net/usage.php.
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"Java is much more programmer-friendly than C or C++, or was for a few years there until they made just as complicated. It's become arguably even harder to learn than C++," Andreessen said. And the mantle of simplicity is being passed on: "PHP is such is an easier environment to develop in than Java."
This is just silly. PHP is far from "simpler" than Java. PHP *is* better suited to basic page generation tasks. Its syntax is easy to learn, and it's quick to get a page running. However, any sort of complexity thrown at the system starts making PHP look difficult and Java look easy. For example, I often write web applications that require that user sessions communicate with each other. Now this is stupidly simple in Java thanks to the use of Singletons or named derivitives. One can easily build a chat room, for example, whereas PHP begins to get a bit more tricky. Now throw really complex needs like PDF generation, Dynamic Excel Spreadsheets, XML/SOAP/XML-RPC/EDI communication, mainframe interfaces, off-brand databases, performance caches, and other large scale features, and suddenly Java doesn't look so hard anymore. PHP, OTOH, begins screaming for mercy.
One would think that Andreessen would understand how to use the right tool for the right job, but apparently not. He should be kept away from the press. He always manages to sound 50 IQ points dumber than he actually is. (A common problem when dealing with the press.)
I've done programming in PHP and in Java.
PHP is straightforward and easy, and most distributions have their own packages for it. Whereas with Java, the initial set up is overwhelming for beginners.
I learnt PHP years ago by myself, and it wasn't really that hard. Yet a few months ago when I was finally required to learn Java, the complexity of the Java frameworks (Hibernate, Spring, etc) tortured me for days before I actually knew what was going on. And it doesn't help when all the frameworks gives such a "bulky" feeling.
The learning curve of Java is definitely much higher than PHP.
Of course, I do agree that Java is much better suited for large scale web programming than PHP. It's much easier to do things cleanly in Java, and although PHP's loose typing is great for a simple 1 page script, I'd rather have the strict typing of Java when it comes to large scale projects.
Little "full disclosure" for everyone.
PS There's more to Java on webservers than J2EE. There's also multiple Open Source versions of J2EE.
I work with PHP and Java (and JSP and XML and enough other acroynms to choke a hippo). Andressen's comments seem so clearly aimed at server-side Java. PHP doesn't do client side, though there are projects underway like GTK and WinBinder. But still... Java was supposed to kill C, and it didn't. PHP won't kill Java either.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Yes, both PHP and Java are free - i'm not talking about the monetary cost of either platform.
I'm talking about the network effects of PHP being available on every shared host in the world.
Try to find a cheap, reliable tomcat hosting service. Then throw a dart at a google search for "web hosting." You'll find that outside of enterprise, PHP is the lingua franca.
So if you're a poor student or struggling entrepreneur looking to make an experiment or prototype, you will naturally gravitate toward PHP (same argument works for mySQL/postgre v the world). And guess who will populate the next gen of enterprise?
I primarily work in ASP.NET, and have done some work with JSP. Those are nice environments (well... ASP.NET is, anyway) -- but for many, many things, they're overkill. A robust OO model is nice for making programmers feel comfortable, but until recently the web has been an inherently procedural undertaking. ASP.NET and AJAX are putting an end to this, but the underlying technology remains stateless.
PHP is procedurally oriented, works well, and -- most important -- is free. I can't convince my boss to touch it, of course, but if some names get behind it, it might become a much easier sell.
All that aside, we typically use PHP for all web-based applications. The ease of coding, and the ability to affect change with zero downtime is a big plus. We can have several programmers affecting changes in one codebase in real time. And, for a program which took us six months to develop in PHP, it would have taken at least fifty percent longer with Java.
Click here or here.
I'll come straight out and admit that I'm a Java programmer, but I've used PHP and I will admit it is simple to use.
;) ). The problem is that Java is so much more than just JSP on the server side, it has an entire framework of technologies (some part of J2EE, some not) that make it a complete package. If they want to compare Java and PHP, it should bring in not only ease of development, but scalability, interoperability and security. I would have also liked to see the number of commerical websites running PHP vs the number of commercial websites running Java. For instance my home page has TorrentFlux on it, which is php based. So I guess I fall into that 22 million, although that's not really by design.
I find the comparison that the article makes between them is very one dimensional, it's saying that PHP is better than JSP, which I suppose is debatable (I prefer JSP
I won't try and say Java is better (because of my limited PHP experience) but if an author wants to convince me that PHP is better than Java, it's going to have to talk about more than simplicity and hype.
Oh, a lesson in history from Mr. I'm my own grandpa.
The alternative to extremely bloated and redundant java and .net web technologies is an extremely basic (old)ASP-alike with all functions and variables sharing the same namespace and global variables running wild. Granted, it's easy. Just as easy as notepad and just as featureless and error-prone...
.net as everybody else, but i'd point to Python, Ruby, Perl or Tcl technologies rather than this sub-Perl refugee...
Hey, i'm just as annoyed at java and
I don't feel like it...
PHP is and will be continue to be popular with the masses simply because, like HTML, the entry barrier is very low. It will fail to make deep inroads at the high end for the same reason: The entry barrier is very low.
Sounds like a contradiction? Not really. The entry barrier for PHP is so low that we are seeing zillions of poorly written, insecure and unscalable PHP apps written by amateur programmers. Resulting in numerous security scares about PHP and contributing more than slightly to the infamous Slashdot Effect where a site that gets a sudden traffic surge craters as it runs out not of datapipe but simple CPU power. This scares the hell out of anyone who considers using PHP in the enterprise.
Don't get me wrong: It is possible to write good, secure, scalable code in PHP. It just isn't very common.
I teach PHP in college since 2001 and I use Java/JSP at work and at home since 2003.
PHP is good for an admin to set up some forum, photo gallery, database administration front end, a CMS, whatever tool you can download form sourceforge and install in a few hours to give users/customers a service.
When you need to develop a solution with specific needs and there's no tool to download and use right off the shelf, PHP gives you lots of headaches.
The API changes a lot, very fast. This is not good. From PHP 3.0 to 4.0 things break and new stuff gets added so fast some sites have to keep using PHP 3 in order to avoid spending many hours recoding old code. Now PHP 5 is a new language altogether.
Lots of changes are for good since PHP was really bad in some areas in early version so the rewrote everything form scratch, that forces developers to relearn and recode.
The lack of abstraction in the PHP API leaves lots of stuff to the developer. For example, working with HTTP headers. The header function just sends whatever header you send in. You have to account for browser bugs on your code and maitain that. The manual is full of user comments regarding how to use certain function that give different results with different databases, browsers, platforms, Apache configurations, etc. Those things don't belong to API, there are bugs, but you have to work around them in your code.
If you use a PHP CMS or a PHP forum, you know the people developping it will do the dirty work for you and release a quality product, but for a small organization with a few programers, migrating from PHP3 to PHP5 to get the new cool stuff they implemented is hard, painful and takes a lot of debugging time.
In contrast Java has managed to keep backwards compatibility while adding new functionality and the API has been quite stable. Of course it has bugs, migration problems and imcompatibilities, but the java developers (SUN, Apache foundation, IBM, etc) make an effort to make developers' life easier. The PHP developers also try, but are less sucessful.
At the same time in Java you don't have such a wide selection of free tools ready to use in a web site, but you do have tons and tons of libraries ready to be integrated in your java web app, which PHP has but in much smaller quantity.
And because I'm bored and I like PHP, my reply to all of the above:
;^)
* PHP sucks.
PHP has functions for practically anything you can imagine. Of course, I'll get into why it doesn't suck in the replies below, as this is a bit too general.
* PHP is for n00bs.
PHP is for developers who want to get something done quickly. The syntax is very easy to learn, and variables are loosely typed, but in my experience this doesn't mean that the language is flawed; it means that one can code up something without having to worry about unnecessary things like pointers, variable conversion and the like. And to be honest, in website scripting I've never come across a need for more advanced syntax than PHP provides in my five or more years of using it.
* PHP is usually poorly written.
This, unfortunately, is usually true. Because PHP is easy to use, it is often used by people who don't want to worry about writing good code either. But like everything else, there are varying grades of professionalism. PHP *can* be written well, it's just a case of taking the time to do so.
* PHP is a scripting language and you can't do anything but write web pages with it.
Scripting language, yes. But it most certainly can be used for things other than websites.
* PHP sucks because the function names are inconsistent.
True, but this is why one has a manual. I've never been all that concerned about it.
* PHP is slow.
Actually, it's really not. Take a look at this comparison between different CGI modules for Apache: PHP actually outdoes Perl here.
* PHP isn't capable of working in a real enterprise.
I haven't had experience with integrating PHP into an "enterprise" situation personally, but I'll refer you to Zend's Enterprise PHP page for various reasons why PHP is indeed ready for the enterprise.
* Real coders use Perl.
Real coders use the tool that best fits the problem.
* PHP doesn't scale.
Now THIS is something I can definitely refute. I work for a company that creates mods for a PHP / Smarty-based online shopping cart known as X-Cart and I can tell you, PHP scales wonderfully, otherwise stores wouldn't use it as a base of their business operations. X-Cart is on the order of hundreds of thousands of lines of PHP code, and very commonly has tens of thousands of customers accessing it concurrently.
And yeah, I know you were joking, but hey, I was bored.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Web apps all have the same problem. They use a goddamn BROWSER as the application platform. This sucks.
I'm looking at a typical jsp right now. Its an awful demoralizing conflation of xml, css, jstl, html, and javascript-- all in one file. As developer, it sucks to work with and it is a major hassle to create a nice user experience with this trash y stuff.
I have not worked with PHP, but looking at the source from the browser page, I imagine the same problems apply.
Whatever happened to the "applet" concept? True, there were problems with it initially, but one would think that these problems could have been solved by now. Instead, the industry turned away from nice clean designs to the brutal mess that is today's web app.
...I can honestly say I avoid PHP at all costs. PHP feels like it was built by committee: there's no consistency in the language. Even with 5 I still feel like I'm hacking together web pages.
.NET on the high end, it's going to need new development tools--both for writing the code and useful libraries, stronger leadership, and a clear plan for the future. I don't see any of this happening in its current state. I consider myself to be a PHP outsider these days, and looking in it doesn't look so fun in the pool.
I feel like there's a lack of standardized libraries for PHP. I've used PearDB, but it's sure not ActiveRecord or Hibernate. Smarty's o.k., but I'm already developing in a template language for HTML pages, why do I need another one? It's like working with JSP tag libraries (which I find equally wasteful).
Fundamentally, I think the tight coupling between view, controller, and model that PHP naturally engenders is bad. Practically, I've seen where Ruby on Rails has gone in just a single year, and it's further than PHP's gone in the last 5. Things you can do in Rails in a few days take weeks of coding in PHP, even with the help of third-party libraries.
PHP has a strong foothold with small, inexpensive ISPs, which is the only reason I think that people still use it. Unfortunately, the "war" between 4 and 5 has really hurt the credibility of PHP moving forward. Does any ISP support PHP 5?
If PHP wants to compete against Ruby on the low end and J2EE and
If you have such problems in Java then write a really small little class that does all this work for you, generically, in one place, so you can access it by saying
... headerN);
... Object paramN);
/.ers are Java coders.)
) {o ccessing Foo",aFoo);
Mailer.mail(to,from,subject,message,header1
Many java frameworks are terrible, but that's a matter of API aesthetic. For instance, I hate the Java frameworks' APIs for reflection and dynamic method invocation and such. So I wrap it all in two methods
public boolean canPerformMethod(String methodSignature);
public Object performMethod(String methodSignature,Object param1
(Note: the above is pseudo-code so I don't have to explain how to do variable number of parameters in Java 5 - not all
(Note2: By using aspect-oriented programming, I can insert these methods high-up in the object-hierarchy)
The point is that now, anywhere in my code I can dynamically invoke methods by:
Foo result = null;
if (target.canPerformMethod("processFoo:String:Foo")
result = (Foo)target.performMethod("method:String:Foo","Pr
}
That simple structure replaces about 10-20 lines of exception handling, method lookup, and all sorts of crap, because I (wait for it) encapsulated it.
I'm not saying it's not convenient to have mail(...). Of course it is. But the point of languages like Java is that if you have a preferred API, you can wrap the complexity of a crappy API with a nicer convenient one in your own code. That's called good programming. No actualy need to whine.
It's only when the raw functionality is not there, or when the raw langauge/runtime capabilities don't actually allow you to create the functionality you want in a convenient form - that's when whining is necessary. But modern Java, with Java 5 + aspectJ pretty much allows anything to be created in relatively convenient APIs.
The only remaining issue is to convince someone at Sun to refactor their core APIs into something that provides some of this convenience out-of-the-box. Or go write Objective-C against the Cocoa APIs on MacOSX. They're pretty nice.
i - This sig provided by
This article is a crock. PHP is great for your $10 a month hosting service domain on a shared server, but Java has been and continues to be the market leader when it comes to writing web based functionality that integrates across an entire enterprise.
Try doing this in PHP.
There is a reason that eBay handles 1 billion transactions a day on Java.
Fact: PHP was released on June 8, 1995.
Fact: The Java Servlet spec (first server-side Java) was released over 4 years later on October 1, 1999.
After 5 years, Java as caught up with and far surpassed PHP in terms of usage, tools, maturity, etc. Java is showing no signs of slowing down. I don't know what iPlanet Marc is on, but on my planet, if you want to do any server-side web programming, you better know J2EE or .NET.
Also funny was this quote from TFA:
Uh, yeah, Marc. That falls solidly in to the category of "thing we wish were true but aren't." I wish Flash wasn't so popular, but the fact is it's used very heavily."Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
PHP may have a bunch of issues, but it's still the best tool for my job.
I have to wonder about the long run here. When I work with Java, I find it a pain to work with, because of all the required boilerplate and the inflexibility. Things have probably gotten better with Java 5, but Java has been a pain in all the years before it.
When I work with PHP, I find it a pain to work with, because of its apparent lack of design. It feels like a cobbled-together heap of features and hacks, and so does the code written in it. I tend to write cleaner code than what I've seen from other people, but that doesn't make the final product any less messy when various people have worked on it.
Neither language is absolutely horrible; comparing them to others, Java is a language with a relatively clean design, and PHP is a good choice in its niche of writing web applications. However, my pain in working with these languages is a direct result of these languages being poorly designed. I'm into programming languages, and I know many that have better designs than Java and PHP. I wonder if these languages won't take over in the future.
Some changes are happening already. Various organizations are moving away from Java for web applications, and I know others that would do well to do so as well. Much of the work that went into PHP 5 comes from a realization that earlier versions were flawed (the same can be said of Perl 6). Ruby appears to be on the rise. Paul Graham and others have had good results employing Common Lisp for web applications.
The only thing I can see standing in the way of better languages taking over the web application sphere is the fact that the decision making process is based more on fame than on qualities. I maintain that Java has become so successful largely because of the enormous hype surrounding it. PHP, Linux and MySQL have also risen largely due to hype. Of course, it's true that you won't overly disadvantage yourself if you use whatever most others use, but it would still be better if decisions were made based on sound knowledge of technical benefits.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
> 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.
Bleh. Windows doesn't even come with a compiler.
I think that's probably why a lot of developers like Unix so much - most systems come with a compiler as standard and the man pages give you all the APIs you need. Grab your favourite editor and off you go!
-- Mike
I don't write in either Java or PHP -- I'm a Grade-A C-slinger -- but here are my REAL-WORLD experiences with both platforms.
.php vs. .jsp seems right on target. So let me enunciate very clearly:
C Coders perspective:
PHP - I wrote some objects for PHP5 about eight months ago. The documentation blows, I had to use gdb and a notepad to figure out some of the idiotic details for accessing the symbol table and so forth. The Horrible, horrible dangling-if-macros are terrible. Took 3 days (from "I know nothing" to "I'm done and debugged").
Java - I wrote some JNI interfaces. Actually, they interfaced to the exact same code as the PHP5 modules! (Making a useful C library, encapsulated in C++ objects usable across Java and PHP platforms). Easy stuff! I used cxxwrap. Took 1 day.
Manager's Perspective (I wear that hat, too): PHP is pretty cool, as long as you treat it like a programming language and perform proper data abstraction, code layout, blah-de-blah. "Web guys" need to learn awful fast that "Web Programming" had better be treated the same was as system programming, or large applications become difficult to manage. PHP does little to enforce this (hey, just stick some code right in the middle of the style sheet!), but good discipline will solve all of PHP's major problems.
It's also nice when PHP the guys ask for help, I say "C library function XXXX will solve your problem" or "the underlying OS call behaves this way, that's probably why you're having issues..." and it transliterates directly into PHP. (And I can look at the PHP sources and actually understand them).
Java, on the other hand -- I can't take my years of experience with the UNIX OS and help anybody coding on Java, because it has absolutely nothing in common with the underlying OS, POSIX, etc. Now, that may not be all that bad, but it's damned frustrating when you plan on doing common, every day operations that work anywhere else BUT Java, and have the platform smacks you in the face.
For example, say you need to link two different web hierarchies together (say, images from your apache server and the same images in your tomcat container). You'd make a software link, right? OH, NOOOOO, you make a soft link and then you spend the next three hours figuring out why the fuck it doesn't work, because those asshats who designed the platform didn't like them, so you instead have to hunt through cryptic XML configuration files to find out how to turn on some asshat undocumented directive to allow a BASIC FUNCTION OF THE OPERATING SYSTEM.
For fuck's sake! Now, I suppose the above criticism is more a J2EE criticism than a Java critism, but, if we want to compare apples to apples,
J2EE SUCKS HUGE DONKEY BALLS.
Essential redux: Each PHP guy gets more done in a day than two Java guys get done in a week.
Why? How can this be? Java solves everything except world hunger!
The Java guys spend three days a week debugging shit that's gone wrong with Tomcat on one server or another. It's always some incompatibility here, surprise-bite-you-in-the-ass-there. Two applications on the same server use the same JAR file, so the containers refuse to load. That sort of thing. Sheer idiocy.
Then they spend one day debugging shit that's gone wrong with Eclipse (or its mangling of the CVS repository, or some ant dependency problem, or)... then they spend half a day each writing code, and another half day synchronizing their changes. And meanwhile they whine that 256 megs of RAM isn't enough to edit a fucking text file (and do NOTHING else at the same time).
And Lord help you if you want to add another table to the database and want them to do something as silly as retrieve the data from it and put it on a web page. Apparently, this is incredibly difficult, because it involves creating new hibernate objects, which of course fucks everything else in the ass, well, because, something called hotspot didn't get it's monthly fucking hormone shot or som
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?