PHP vs. Node.js: the Battle For Developer Mind Share

snydeq writes: Simplicity vs. closures, speed of coding vs. raw speed — InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes a look at how PHP and Node.js stack up against each other. "It's a classic Hollywood plot: the battle between two old friends who went separate ways. Often the friction begins when one pal sparks an interest in what had always been the other pal's unspoken domain. In the programming language version of this movie, it's the introduction of Node.js that turns the buddy flick into a grudge match: PHP and JavaScript, two partners who once ruled the Internet together but now duke it out for the mind share of developers."

Comments

In the real world

[clickclickdrone]

I'd have thought most people are just getting on with whatever the preferred toolset is at their company and never give this mythical war a second thought.

Missing

[gmuslera]

PHP is far more available in cheap hosting solutions. The apps are simpler to deploy (simply put them along your static html files in a web server that supports its extension), and simple apps are simpler in php. The ecosystem around was not touched in the review, Compose vs npm, joyent vs the community behind php, the future of both platforms.

In the other hand, PHP is (or at least, used to be recently enough) a fractal of bad design

My brain fell out

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't merely useless, nor just bad, it's completely misleading. For it may look like he's giving the high-level, the author appears to have no depth to draw on to say more than the shallowest things. As such, he's presenting pond scum, not the high points from an expert deep sea fisher.

And this is pretty bad, given that infoworld says about themselves:

InfoWorld is the destination of choice for technology decision makers and business leaders who seek expert, in-depth analysis of enterprise technology.

while the TFA says about the author:

Peter Wayner is contributing editor at InfoWorld and the author of more than 16 books on diverse topics, including open source software, autonomous cars, privacy-enhanced computation, digital transactions, and steganography.

I'm loath to seek out his writing, in fact fairly convinced to stay well away, while at the same time morbidly curious just how bad his "more than 16 books" will misinform.

Dumbest article on the subject. Ever.

[Qbertino]

TFA is a bunch of blabbering from someone who has no idea what he's talking about - void of anything useful.

To get this out of the way:
Node.js is a serious contender to topple PHP off the server-side, for the simple fact that we would then have one PL less in the entire webstack, which is way to
complex anyway.

I myself have been pondering trying out Node for larger non-trivial projects. I'd be the first to switch if it were possible.
I haven't yet - Node is just not quite ready for prime-time.
Why?

1.) The tools don't exist yet and Node seems to gather the same problems Rails has: A bloated, instable and unreliable mumbo-jumbo of countless libs, tools and extensions - various package managers included, each built on a whim and powered by a neat logo and a 6-week fad that sweeps the community and adds to the mess already there. In short: The Rails problem of to much navel-gazing and not enough of solving real world problems.

2.) Callback hell.
In fact, its Node/JavaScripts callback hell that made me realise a thing that is so great about PHP: What you see is what has been made, for you, for that specific request. LAMP is such a bizar solution no one in his right mind would suspect it could work, yet most site on the internet run on it. The stack is so vertical it actually makes any Java solution look like an ADHD driven Visual Basic School projekt in comparsion. And I mean vertical right down to the way it actually works!

Try building anything like Joomla or Wordpress with other solutions such as JS and you'll end up with problems that completely leave the domain of your work. The simple fact that a PHP request is dead and gone when its finished sending its request reply and all the rest it offers is custom built around any strange problem the

Any concern you have right at the moment when developing for ther server side web PHP has neatly covered ... ok, forget I said neatly, ... but covered and everything else is put aside. PHP is born out of a template engine, and as bizar as it sounds, that's its advantage. Any problem the Web domain can come up with puts PHP in a very strong position. Serverside things PHP just shrugs of with some strange custom internal function has JS and Ruby tripping and falling flat on their face with no chance for rescue.

3.) PHP is 10 years ahead of the game. No joke.
Try finding a product like Typo3 or Wordpress in Java, Node, Rails or any other backend runtime you fancy. Won't happen. It take me 5 minutes to download Typo3, 2 hours to set up - mostly because configging Apache and setting up T3 is an arcane science unto itself - but then it's there. Everything I would ever want for a web product.
Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress and co. are even way easyer. The only other contender holding up is Pythons Zope/Plone. All else is a decade behind at least. Rails included.

Bottom line:
As soon as Node gets their shit sorted out and offers a serious upside vis-a-vis LAMP, PHP is going to continue to rule. It gets the job done. Node and Rails don't. End of Story.

Re:okay

[mwvdlee]

And plain wrong in many places.

There's nothing about either Node or PHP that forces you to use or not use HTML or service calls.
Same for separation of concerns (which pretty much boils down to the same thing).
For instance; both PHP and Node handle SQL equally well, i.e. they can both hook up to most databases and let them deal with SQL.
Same for JSON. Just because it kinda looks like Javascript and started out loosely based on it, doesn't mean Javascript handles it differently.
I also don't think these two were ever "old friends who went separate ways". They started out separate.