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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.'"
So, you might want to tell me why would I be joking?
Because PHP is an awful, awful, mess of a language, in fact it's more like a framework + language, but anyway. Just because you could use it to make a GUI application, doesn't make it close to the right tool for the job.
Do yourself a favour and look into other scripting languages, like perl, ruby or python - you would at least learn why people complain about PHP.
I always wish other languages would have such by default
Taking the iPhone as an example, C, Obj-C and C++ all have extensive libraries, and many actual application frameworks available for free, which cover everything PHP does and a whole lot more. The default Obj-C for example has a huge number of built in libraries available. The fact you don't know this rings alarm bells and says to me you should try using something other than PHP just to give you a sense of perspective.