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Adobe's iPhone Hail Mary
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions whether the move to port Flash to the iPhone isn't a last-ditch effort on Adobe's part to remain relevant in the quickly evolving smartphone market. By allowing developers to compile existing Flash apps into native binaries, Adobe believes it has found a way around Apple's requirements that no non-Apple API interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an app, a clause that has also prevented Sun from porting JVM to the iPhone. The resulting apps will be completely stand-alone, with no runtimes and no Flash Player required — if Apple lets Adobe get away with it, no small feat given how protective Apple has been about its app market. But as much as Apple has at stake here, Adobe may actually have more, McAllister writes. 'Already the idea of using Web languages and tools to build smartphone applications is taking hold. Palm has built an entire smartphone platform around the idea. Apple supports the use of Web technologies like AJAX to build applications based on the iPhone's Safari browser. And developers will soon even be able to build Web-based applications for BlackBerry handsets, thanks to a new SDK from Research in Motion. As late to the game as it is, what Adobe needs now is to convince developers that Flash is better than the other options — and that could be a tough sell.'"
Can you cite an actual example of something wrong with it?
Sure. I've used it, and it gets the job done, but I didn't much like it compared to the many other options - trying to force development of a GUI application into PHP is my idea of a nightmare, and comparing it to C and saying that it has far more libraries is laughable, considering that most PHP additions (image manipulation for example) are just wrappers around C based tools. My object to PHP is not that it is impossible to use, it's that it's messy and not very well thought out in many regards. It's quick and dirty, with the emphasis on the dirty.
A few problems with PHP off the top of my head:
There is no clean separation of logic and view (or MVC if you prefer that split) - the language itself encourages mixing code and presentation, often with horrendous results. You can work against this, but you're always going against the flow - see the many examples of PHP CMS etc for great examples of this kind of mistake in action. They work, but only just, and the internals are often very messy.
The naming conventions for the API are all over the map - any language that has functions named stuff like mysql_real_escape_string, as opposed to the still extant mysql_escape_string, has obvious problems with design philosophy. Maybe next year they'll come out with mysql_really_escape_the_string_this_time? It is very difficult to guess function names because there are no clear conventions, and the whole thing has grown organically to a huge bundle of disparate functions, some of which definitely do not belong in a language and should be broken out into modules or put into objects like strings. Stuff like eregi_replace, str_ireplace and str_replace is needlessly confusing because the naming conventions are inconsistent and cryptic.
Strings and arrays are not proper objects, so you have to use a mix of procedural and oo code everywhere - it'd be nice to be able to call methods on strings and chain stuff like Ruby. The object model was also weirdly broken till PHP5 and is really bolted on.
Doesn't have closures (just added to C/Obj-C by Apple).
Unicode strings are still not properly supported.
The syntax inherits everything which is bad about perl (it's quite possible to write very difficult to read code), and doesn't improve on it one iota.
I'm sure I could do a search and turn up a few more issues, but it generally just feels ungainly compared to any other language I've used (Ruby, Objective-C, C, Python). I think the author of the above comment saying everything could be done better in PHP really should explore other languages before dismissing them as somehow lacking, and understand that different languages have different strengths, and learning to use other languages could teach them something about how to write good code in PHP.
Having worked with it, PHP doesn't strike me as a very good language by most metrics, and it certainly is not more complete than the many other options in any arena. There is simply no comparison in my opinion with a properly structured API like cocoa for GUI apps.