• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

PHP is dead, long live PHP

B

BuddhistPunk

Gawd
Joined
Mar 21, 2002
Messages
656
I have been working with PHP in one way or another for almost 4 years, and consider myself to be quite adept and confortable developing with it.

For some reason today it dawned on me that PHP seems to be nothing more than a flight of fancy for "home coders". Now that is a damning statement if ever there was one so I should qualify this thought.

If you take a snapshot of the most commonly visited sites (amazon, ebay, cnn, bbc etc), none of them (that i could find) use PHP as their content delivery language. Infact the vast majority seem not to use PHP at all.

There must be a reason for the decision to not use PHP and to be honest the reason fails me, as I have found it to be scalable and flexible enough to perform just about any web task you could possibly ask of it.

So the question is, why is it not used at the top end of web site delivery
 
Well, I don't know much about PHP, however, I do know Perl has been around a lot longer and has had more time to adapt then PHP.With Perl you can (as far as I know) do much more then PHP. Maybe that's why? I really don't know, just trying to voice my opinion.
 
At the top end, ASP.NET holds a huge advantage for new stuff. As for older top-end, I would go with the above rationale -- cgi-based systems were simply a mature standard. Also (I'm not sure on this, but seems plausible), cgi systems might allow execution of compiled code, the same advantage that .NET has.
 
lomn75 said:
At the top end, ASP.NET holds a huge advantage for new stuff. As for older top-end, I would go with the above rationale -- cgi-based systems were simply a mature standard. Also (I'm not sure on this, but seems plausible), cgi systems might allow execution of compiled code, the same advantage that .NET has.
Click to expand...

I can agree that Perl, cgi etc have been around much longer than PHP, but PHP is no baby in the web world, it is a relatively mature and stable delivery system.

I have been working the ASP .NET for the last 3 or 4 months, and I can honestly say I am mightly impressed by its "out of the box" capabilities, alot of the "code" is already written into the framework therefore complex tasks in PHP and mind blowingly simple, as an example, using xpath queries to navigate through XML documents. Without resorting to other non standard modules doing the same in PHP is almost glacial. You also have the power of being able to use true (ish) OO design, whereas PHPs class system is only a few notches above a frig.

That being said ASP .NET does a major negative point, you are restricted to serving your pages from IIS, that fact alone will serverly limit its spread over the next few years. That being said I have recently been working on an module that will serve ASP .NET code from Apache, at the moment it works but still needs some tweaks here and there.
 
BuddhistPunk said:
That being said ASP .NET does a major negative point, you are restricted to serving your pages from IIS, that fact alone will serverly limit its spread over the next few years. That being said I have recently been working on an module that will serve ASP .NET code from Apache, at the moment it works but still needs some tweaks here and there.
Click to expand...

http://www.thedoh.com:8081/mono/ Some don't work. That's a transparent proxy to the XSP daemon.

I *REALLY* look forward to playing with ASP.NET! I've thought about putting up IIS on a machine in house to play.

I agree with the OP, PHP is a hobbyist's language. I would consider ASP.NET and Java to be production quality.
 
doh said:
http://www.thedoh.com:8081/mono/ Some don't work. That's a transparent proxy to the XSP daemon.
Click to expand...

Can you/will you post up some more information about how you got that XSP proxy working etc etc.

As I mentioned earlier I have written an apache module that acts as a proxy between Apache and the real .NET Framework - I am curious to see how it was done with Mono.
 
Companies generally like to know that their product is backed by a company, not a group of developers... support is very important to a professional business. Professional businesses want results and they want them NOW....
 
I think you will see some of that start with PHP5. With the new object model and some of the new features PHP is just starting to have many of the functions that things like JSP already have.

I do recall that Yahoo dumped their own scripting for PHP a while ago. There's a start for you.
 
Something also to consider that sites you mentioned have been around for years and recoding from one language to another would take alot of time and money. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
 
PHP is due to get a major boost in the enterprise market when Oracle makes it one of the officially supported languages. I remember something about Sun backing it too...


Can't find the links 'cuz Slashdot's search is borked ATM.
 
deuce868 said:
I think you will see some of that start with PHP5. With the new object model and some of the new features PHP is just starting to have many of the functions that things like JSP already have.

I do recall that Yahoo dumped their own scripting for PHP a while ago. There's a start for you.
Click to expand...

This is too little too late. PHP needs strict typing and needs a more formal OOP model with proper and standard OOP concepts. And the fact is that since PHP is an interpretted language it will always be slower than compiled languages. Granted you can buy the Zend compiler but that's a bit out of reach for most people!
 
doh said:
Granted you can buy the Zend compiler but that's a bit out of reach for most people!
Click to expand...
I have no idea on pricing, but wouldn't that be comparable in cost to a server-class Windows in order to have IIS for ASP.NET?
 
doh said:
This is too little too late. PHP needs strict typing and needs a more formal OOP model with proper and standard OOP concepts. And the fact is that since PHP is an interpretted language it will always be slower than compiled languages. Granted you can buy the Zend compiler but that's a bit out of reach for most people!
Click to expand...

Explain to me why an interpreted scripting language needs strict typing? ASP/VBScript/Javascript/Perl seem to do fine without strict typing. And what is it "too late" for? For it to be an enterprise level language? For it to be successful?
 
Sgarissta said:
Explain to me why an interpreted scripting language needs strict typing? ASP/VBScript/Javascript/Perl seem to do fine without strict typing. And what is it "too late" for? For it to be an enterprise level language? For it to be successful?
Click to expand...
Well, of course programming with variants is always fun. Thing is, it's not always the most productive way of doing things, and once a system's been through a few maintenance/support cycles, it degenerates into a support programmer's nightmare. But what on earth has the fact that it's interpreted got to do with loose typing? Absolutely nothing. VBA is interpreted, but it has strict typing (of sorts, anyway).
 
:LJ: said:
Well, of course programming with variants is always fun. Thing is, it's not always the most productive way of doing things, and once a system's been through a few maintenance/support cycles, it degenerates into a support programmer's nightmare. But what on earth has the fact that it's interpreted got to do with loose typing? Absolutely nothing. VBA is interpreted, but it has strict typing (of sorts, anyway).
Click to expand...

The reason I even mention it being interpreted is that MOST (but by no means all) dynamic typed languages are loosely typed (and vice versa).

Not to be nitpicky (okay maybe just a little) but PHP does not include a data type for "variant". PHP is more like PERL in that whatever data is currently held in it, is the type. It isn't typeless, it's dynamically typed. Somewhere there is an article by one of the core PHP developers discussing how PHP is not a typeless language, but instead its just dynamically typed. I'll try and hunt that down.

And it is also possible to program in PHP and keep things somewhat typed. PHP has a host of is_vartype functions, along with type-casting for this very reason. While you can definitely get by in PHP without ever worrying about data types, it definitely makes your, and anyone who has to look at your code's life easier if you do.
 
I really do not like to use PHP because I consider it the easiest and a newb language but that is not really true. Easy but it can do just about anything given the libraries. Most those sites actually use Windows and that is why they use .net or old asp. Windows can use php just fine but maybe they don't want to use it because it seems like the language that all the noobs use.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top