Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Which Web Platform Would You Use?
New submitter datavirtue writes "I'm about to embark on developing active content (database driven, and web services) for the first time for my website and I have grown to love PHP. Knowing that there are other web development platforms available, and noticing some disdain for PHP in some circles, I'm curious to know which platforms slashdotters prefer along with the reasons why. Before I get started into heavy development I would like to get some opinions and more facts. Why shouldn't I use PHP?"
...as Subjective and Argumentative.
Oh, wrong site.
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
Idiots like this guy here are exactly why there is so much hate for PHP. Here is a classic example of someone comparing PHP - a language - to a full blown web development framework. Ruby on Rails people do exactly the same.
You can argue about the differences and benefits of ASP.NET vs RoR vs Zend Framework vs Yii vs [insert another web framework here] - but comparing a language to a framework is outright idiotic.
This is completely true, but very unimportant. PHP under Apache (And really what serious professional would use anything else?) as a module and needs no threads; that's the job of the httpd daemon itself.
If you need threads; if your Java indoctrination only allows you to solve problems by creating huge monolithic applications, ignoring excellent work by engineers who are much, much smarter than you, then yeah... PHP won't cut it for you. You'll need a language that will be better suited to reinventing the wheel. That is definitely not PHP's strength.
(Ah, I love it when a good straw man argument comes together.)
I... would not use ASP, I'd use PHP before ASP, and Python before that.
One of the advantages of python, is that, with mod_wsgi, it's very fast.
Actually, what I'm working on is, a mod_wsgi handler in apache, that sends the request to a back-end server, originally written in python, but now I'm switching to C# (still no ASP). Although there are ASP Modules for Apache/mono, I belive mod_wsgi has much more thorough testing, and will therefore be a better-cross-platform solution.
In the end, answer these three questions:
1) What platforms are you most comfortable with? Rank them.
2) What platforms have the best modules/libraries for what you want to do? Rank them.
3) What platforms have the best performance? Rank them.
Now, given the rankings on 1-3, which platform is best for you? Nobody can answer this but you. Without knowing the details of what you want, we really can provide advice on #2 and #3.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I've been doing a lot of web programming, and I evolved from PERL to PHP to Python. I happen to prefer Python these days, but there's nothing wrong with PHP. I wrote my company's PTO system using PHP (LAMP) and it works great. I would also suggest JQuery or similar for richer content.
Most "disdain" for any given language is mostly elitism and people self-validating their own choices. It's true PHP can be messy, but I recall having a Ruby developer look at my PERL code and be surprised at how readable it actually was... in other words, it's up to the programmer. I can make some pretty ugly programs in any language.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Because people are looking for actual opinions from developers, not market-speak from commercial marketers. I mean, mod_mono?? Really???? LOL!
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
If copying and pasting blocks in Python is not working right, then get an editor that is aware of Python indenting. And switch on the option to always convert tabs to spaces.
Whenever anybody mentions indentation as their one argument for/against Python, I'm pretty sure they know very little about the language. It's like the very first thing about the language you learn.
How a language denotes blocks is just a detail. You learn best practice for that language and get on with it.
You might as well ask which religion is the best one.
Here's a little secret for you: Anyone that uses the word "enterprise" is full of shit. It is used by mediocre developers who work at relatively big corporations and have been forced through the years to work with a bunch of bureaucracy. This people can't release a fucking shell script without 10 formal test cases, 50 meetings, 10 flowcharts, and it's own repository.
Serious huge projects are written in C++. Serious huge projects that need incredible performance are written in C with assembly optimizations. When somebody tells you that you can't write anything if it's not done in Java, that guy is a corporate droid. If somebody tells you the same for Perl, he's an old monk. If somone tells you that for Ruby/Python/Brainfuck, he's a snob and a fan of that particular language, ignore him too.
Truth is, leaving aside the obvious differences, when it comes to features that help organize huge projects, C has nothing that PHP doesn't implement on some way. Don't get me wrong, I'm not comparing the base of all modern computing with a modern and not very well designed interpreted language, I'm talking about features that some idiots would call "corporate". And yet, there are incredibly HUGE projects written entirely in C. And yes, there are also huge projects written in PHP.
Truth is, if you are a good coder, you'll do a good job even if you have to use Basic. And if you are not, you'll write spaghetti code even in C++.
PHP is a simple, straight to the point language, with a very clear syntax, that is great for web development. It's syntax is very much C-like, just like Javascript, and that certainly helps when you are writting web apps. It's easy to find PHP coders, and that certainly helps too.
The problem with PHP's reputation is that it's incredibly easy to just write some script or modify an existing one, and call yourself a coder. So the amount of bad PHP code out there is incredibly huge and incredibly public. Of course, if you reviewed each of those Corporate-enterprise-mega-super-jumbo java apps, you would find as many WTFs as you could in your average PHP project, the only difference is that the assholes rooting for Java won't show you their code, and they'll act very dignified.
Also, avoid the motherfucking frameworks. You don't need them, at all.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Let me help with the standard /. car analogy of why people are pissed off with that answer.
Question:
I need to buy a nice set of metric socket sets to work on my car (my car was built in TN by a domestic company last century, yet is almost totally metric), and I'm not buying Chinese chrome plated plastic from walmart, can /. advise me on a nice place to get socket sets or general advice on procurement (note, I'm in market for 6-sides not those "bolt rounder" 12-sides and also I wanna get high grade impact sockets)?
Answer:
Well Saturn of Chattanooga never steered me wrong when I needed the plastic thermostat replaced with the brass one back in '98 due to the recall and I'm sure nothing has changed in the last 14 years so I'd go there.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
They all suck, which one sucks the least depends on the circumstances of your project (time, budget, techincal aspects, what you already know, what you would like to learn, performance requirements, scalability requirements).
I'm a .Net developer, and I find a lot of what you say is true about .Net especially with respect to the standard controls. However, there's nothing stopping you from writing PHP style code in .Net. That exact line (if statement) you wrote out in PHP could easily have been done exactly the same in C#. Personally, after using .Net for 10 years, I have never actually used the standard controls, but rather just went about using the language to generate HTML because that's what seemed to cause the least friction. You end up generating your own libraries for the standard interface elements your applications uses. I've found this true of just about every programming language I've ever used. The standard stuff is sufficient for getting a prototype out the door quickly, but if you have a big project, you end up having to write a lot of custom code, because the included stuff never dose what it's needed to. The PHP style code ends up being the best starting point, because you don't waste a lot of time trying to bend the included stuff to do things it was never meant to do.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Very well, C# (a language) is a very excellent language. It can be used for server side scripting, just like PHP. Same with Java. However, it's generally assumed that your language of choice is going to be couple with some sort of framework. The great thing about Java and C# is that the skillset is easily transferable to areas outside of writing web pages. This is very important for me, as my application is more than a web page. It's an ecosystem of several applications that work together; emailing reports, collecting data, managing billings, etc. It allows me to reuse code and have one data access layer for all of my programs ensuring that they access the database in a uniform fashion. I don't know if it's possible, but I certainly don't know anyone personally who is writing desktop LOB applications using PHP.
On a related note, Silverlight is an awesome platform. I won't touch it or use it because I don't think it has a future, which is unfortunate. It's certainly easier, faster, and more elegant that writing ASP.NET web pages. Frankly, web development sucks, and I look forward to a day (and I'll probably be retired by then) when there's a good universal client/server paradigm that's not based around HTML and JavaScript.
Actually PHP is pretty bad as a language. Like Perl it does nothing to encourage proper design or even readability.
What people don't understand is that a good programer can write a good, stable, and scaleable program in just about any language. The best can do it in Assembly language.
Bad programers can write crap in any language.
The problem is that most programers fall in the middle. A good language will help them write good code.
So what is good about PHP? That is simple, it is popular, everywhere, and has a lot of support. IMHO it is the Microsoft Basic of the web. I have not played with Yii, Cake, or Zend but they all sound very interesting.
One may want to go one step higher and possibly look at something like Drupal or Joomla instead of a framework. What the original poster wants to do may already be available in one of those CMSs or could be added to it as a module.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.