PHP Succeeding Where Java Has Failed 610
ficken writes "Web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen recently announced his prediction that PHP will be more popular than Java for building web-based applications." From the article: "Wooing programmers is nothing new in the computing industry, where players constantly jockey to establish their products as an essential foundation. Indeed, many credit Microsoft's success to its highly regarded programming tools, which make it easier for developers to write software that run on Windows. PHP has caught on widely. About 22 million Web sites employ it, and useage is steadily increasing. About 450 programmers have privileges to approve changes to the software. Major companies that employ PHP include Yahoo, Lufthansa and Deutsche Telekom's T-Online." Meanwhilie, Piersky writes "Zend has announced its rival to .NET and J2EE, with the Zend PHP Framework. In a press release, they stated that it will be 'A Web application framework which will standardize the way PHP applications are built. The Zend PHP Framework will accelerate and improve the development and deployment of mission-critical PHP Web applications'. This will for part of Zend's PHP Collaboration Project"
I am completely unbiased... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I am completely unbiased... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to say, just not working with Tomcat is a plus (though I give major Props to the Fedora team for the option to install Tomcat right off the install disks)...When gcj finally catches up, I'll be a happy puppy.
Re:I am completely unbiased... (Score:5, Interesting)
Does definitely remind me of VB, though the syntax isn't as screwy.
Re:I am completely unbiased... (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh?
Not sure what you mean here. If by integrate you mean communicate with other languages there's things like CORBA and SOAP, if you mean call other shared libraries there's always JNI if you can't find a java lib to do something.
Until, as you say, gcj or any other piece of free software catches up, Java won't be usable.
Strange, I'm using it every day at work. Have been in one way or another professionally for 8 years now.
It died as a client-side language, and is struggling on the server as well.
You do realise that is no better than a BSD is dying troll right?
Just checked Moster.com. 105 java positions available within 50 miles of my house, 18 for PHP, 42 for perl
Now I'm saying that as someone who also uses PHP. I've been using it quite a bit lately and don't mind it at all, but we're talking apples and oranges here. Sure PHP can be used to write monstrously sloppy and/or insecure code, but so can any language. PHP can also be used to write clean easily maintable secure code.
PHP wasn't even close to java in terms of object oriented coding until PHP5 came out, which unfortuneatly has been very slow to appear on most 3rd party hosting servers and distros.
My only real gripes with PHP are the lack of a standard DB connectivity layer like JDBC. PEAR:DB and ADODB are close, but they still rely on non-php libraries so setting up a connection to oracle or sql server is painful. The other thing is a lack of type hinting for primatives. Seems kinda silly to have to do a check if something is an int or double in the method instead of just putting it in the method's signature. I'm know its a loosely typed language, but type hinting is there as an option for objects, why not primatives too?
I'm looking forward to PHP5.5 its going to have some real nice features that will bring it little closer to server side java and a little further from something like
Re:I am completely unbiased... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I am completely unbiased... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's a bit more readable than Perl, simply because Perl lets you get away with things that php does not. $_ leaps to mind.
But Perl gets a bad rep from people who write sloppy Perl code. If you break things out into packages and functions and aren;t afraid to use linebreaks, the code doesn't become an illegible snarled mess. The things I see
Re:I am completely unbiased... (Score:5, Interesting)
[Java] died as a client-side language.
Not sure how much this is worth, but as we speak the top item on the Most Active Projects list over on SourceForge (insert tinfoil hat disclaimer here), Azureus [sourceforge.net] is a client side Java app. For those of you keeping score at home, the #2 spot, GAIM [sourceforge.net], is in C and PHP comes in at #3 via phpMyAdmin [sourceforge.net]. Keep in mind this is looking at quality (and a pretty wierd messure of quality, at that), not quantity, but still intersting.
Re:I am completely unbiased... (Score:4, Funny)
PHP is great stuff (Score:2, Insightful)
I suppose that's true in most jobs, though.
Re:PHP is great stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't know about you, but it sounds dangerous to me.
Re:PHP is great stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
Pardon me while I roll my eyes (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just silly. PHP is far from "simpler" than Java. PHP *is* better suited to basic page generation tasks. Its syntax is easy to learn, and it's quick to get a page running. However, any sort of complexity thrown at the system starts making PHP look difficult and Java look easy. For example, I often write web applications that require that user sessions communicate with each other. Now this is stupidly simple in Java thanks to the use of Singletons or named derivitives. One can easily build a chat room, for example, whereas PHP begins to get a bit more tricky. Now throw really complex needs like PDF generation, Dynamic Excel Spreadsheets, XML/SOAP/XML-RPC/EDI communication, mainframe interfaces, off-brand databases, performance caches, and other large scale features, and suddenly Java doesn't look so hard anymore. PHP, OTOH, begins screaming for mercy.
One would think that Andreessen would understand how to use the right tool for the right job, but apparently not. He should be kept away from the press. He always manages to sound 50 IQ points dumber than he actually is. (A common problem when dealing with the press.)
Re:Pardon me while I roll my eyes (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Pardon me while I roll my eyes (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Pardon me while I roll my eyes (Score:4, Informative)
Java is not slow in server-side, it is just slow on desktop with Swing. Get Tomcat and try benchmarking some JSPs if you don't believe me. Templates with java might be slower than JSP, but anyway, page rendering is something that impacts the performance of web application the least.
With java you EXTREMELY RARELY need to write extensions, usually you can find java libraries (most of them open source) that do the stuff you need. Or you can just use standart java class libraries, that are enough for 95% of cases. This way you can get a platform-independent solution for no additional cost. While your DLLs (.so's?) will have to be compiled for each architecture, coded to be cross-platform, installed by system administrators, etc.
If you need to interface with C++/C, there is JNI (Java native interface, It is hairy and unfriendly though). Of you can integrate via some kind of interprocess communication (pipes still work, as will TCP, with java you can write TCP client/server in 10-30 lines of code). This way you can have any language on the other side of IPC. You can use webservices/CORBA/XML RPC if you want to be fancy.
--Coder
Re:Pardon me while I roll my eyes (Score:3, Informative)
That's called a theory. It's much harder to build in reality, and mostly sucks anyway since you still don't get any namespace and have to decorate every damn function like there was no god.
Thing is in Java you can write your extensions in Java (the JIT compiler is running behind so perfs are good anyway),
Re:Pardon me while I roll my eyes (Score:3, Informative)
No, especially not server side. Reaches within a few % of C++ speed in well-established benchmarks:
http://www.shudo.net/jit/perf/ [shudo.net]
bulky,
No. It can run within a few 100k on mobile devices. Non-GUI java apps can run in just a few MB.
not user friendly.
A vague term, which could mean anything.
Re:Pardon me while I roll my eyes (Score:2)
PHP is a great language for small web applications, but doing something complex like an insurance intranet site, and Java is clearly the better option.
Re:Pardon me while I roll my eyes (Score:2)
He does not mean simple as in stupid, he means simple as in easy to use. The infrastructure, the language, the libraries are all more accessible in PHP than in Java. It is for these reasons programmers like PHP.
Your points Re: Tasks that are more sophisticated are right on though.
Re:Pardon me while I roll my eyes (Score:5, Insightful)
Andreessen knows exactly how to use the right tool for the job, like a surgeon. His tool is the media, and his job, as a new member of the board at Zend, is to promote PHP.
Re:Pardon me while I roll my eyes (Score:5, Informative)
OK, this is a troll if I ever saw one and may I be damned for feeding one but here it goes:
Go look at PEAR [php.net] and the PHP manual index [php.net] and then tell people PHP doesn't have a platform offering all those.
Re:Java failing? (Score:3, Insightful)
On the contrary, the article makes it very clear: Java is failing to provide income for Marc Andreesen.
Re:PHP is great stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
AFAIK:
J2EE won't fail... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:J2EE won't fail... (Score:3)
And nobody said J2EE was going to die. It's just that more people are realizing it isn't always the best way to develop a web app. IMO (and some people say I'm wrong sometimes), Java excels where you need to interface with legacy and/or disparate systems. If you don't need to do that, Java and J2EE might
Re:J2EE won't fail... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is exactly contrary to my experience. Java *sucks* at playing nice with other systems, unless you build up a "play nice with Java" layer in those other systems first. PHP, shitty as it is, is much better. Python and Perl are both much better (Python more than perl these days, imo) as glue code.
Java works best when it can run in long running, memory hogging, monolithic processes, where it's development and execution model ca
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
What? The two do different things.
Will be? (Score:3, Insightful)
Help me out here (Score:5, Insightful)
I am prepared to have my mind blown here, can someone enlighten me?
Re:Help me out here (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Help me out here (Score:2)
Re:Help me out here (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Help me out here (Score:4, Insightful)
People recommend Smarty because PHP feels pretty incomplete without it. And it's not about separating code from contentit's about separating business logic from display logic. And the syntax is really easy.
Re:Help me out here (Score:3, Insightful)
It's nice to be able to give the people responsible for content and layout access to the files of the website, without giving them access to the code that actually contacts the database, has access to server globals, etc. You can enforce that sort of separation via policy rather than code, but if its only policy, there's a temptation to bend the rules, es
Re:Help me out here (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Help me out here (Score:4, Insightful)
Come again? You're saying that {$value} somehow separates presentation from code more than does <?=$value;?>?
Re:Help me out here (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Help me out here (Score:2, Interesting)
On the flip side, I've been working with Ruby on Rails [rubyonrails.org] and it's beautiful. Scripts to generate the starting points for your web files, separation of design and implementation, a great framework. Only thing
Re:Help me out here (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Help me out here (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Help me out here (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Help me out here (Score:2)
We use one servlet/many handlers to generate XML, and the presentation layer is XSL(T). So yes, you can do Java with no code in your presentation layer.
Re:Help me out here (Score:3, Interesting)
Templating is part of the solution, but so is good app design. If you don't want to mix your logic, you simply need to code it that way. Zend PHP Framework will help enforce some of the same separation as Java does, but it's not strictly necessary. You can do MVC app design withou
PHP Desktop Apps?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:PHP Desktop Apps?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, php-gtk is very useful when you have an existing PHP web app that you want to port into a desktop app. It's a great project, but is definitely not meant for large-scale apps.
Re:PHP Desktop Apps?! (Score:5, Funny)
What are you talking about? I'm posting this right now on my php-coded web-bro&%($(*#&%#&@&NO CARRIER
Guessed wrong again! (Score:5, Funny)
So I decided that I'd focus on Java for my depth. Now I read that I guessed wrong again!
Maybe I should have gone C#/.ASP.
No, Python and Zope are where it's at!
No way, Ruby is the way to go. Arrrgh!
Re:Guessed wrong again! (Score:2)
You make a good point. Fortunately PHP, Python, and Ruby are simplistic enough where specialization require a huge investiment in time like Java or C++. I think the hacking world is pretty saturated with languages. It started with Java in 1995, Perl, ASP, PHP, Python, and really ended with Ruby a few years ago. None of these languages has really advanced the state of the art. I am still waiting for Lisp to become fashionable again. We'd all be better off.
Re:Guessed wrong again! (Score:3, Insightful)
The Success of PHP (Score:3, Informative)
Well, of course. PHP works for free.
Wondering where the '22 million web sites' comes from? http://www.php.net/usage.php [php.net].
Re:The Success of PHP (Score:2, Informative)
Caching (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know much Php but as far as I can tell there is no way to do this natively. This is one of the reasons I don't use php. You see site like groklaw get overloaded when Slashdot hits them because they pull the freaking article out of the database every time it's requested.
If somebody could show me some in process caching that'd take me a long way to ditching php. I don't mean caching to disk either. Caching to disk is much slower t
Both have strengths and weaknesses (Score:4, Insightful)
PHP is straightforward and easy, and most distributions have their own packages for it. Whereas with Java, the initial set up is overwhelming for beginners.
I learnt PHP years ago by myself, and it wasn't really that hard. Yet a few months ago when I was finally required to learn Java, the complexity of the Java frameworks (Hibernate, Spring, etc) tortured me for days before I actually knew what was going on. And it doesn't help when all the frameworks gives such a "bulky" feeling.
The learning curve of Java is definitely much higher than PHP.
Of course, I do agree that Java is much better suited for large scale web programming than PHP. It's much easier to do things cleanly in Java, and although PHP's loose typing is great for a simple 1 page script, I'd rather have the strict typing of Java when it comes to large scale projects.
Till next year (Score:2)
Marc Andreessen is on Zend's Board of Directors (Score:5, Informative)
Little "full disclosure" for everyone.
PS There's more to Java on webservers than J2EE. There's also multiple Open Source versions of J2EE.
Re:Marc Andreessen is on Zend's Board of Directors (Score:2)
Good to hear though since this just seemed a bit too silly to be true. Sure PHP is a way easier way to get the typical website up and running, but the Java stack of libraries and tools is incredibly much more comprehensive. Sure this means that PHP is an excellent pick for 90% of all web applications in the world, whereas Java shoots for the full 100% but is more difficult to deal with. This is
Re:Marc Andreessen is on Zend's Board of Directors (Score:3, Informative)
Either Ruby (and RoR) or Python (and Django, Zope, the terrific TurboGears or any other framework) would probably be much more interresting and enjoyable.
Do remember, though, that none of them are Java, you have to forget the Java way and "get" the philosophy of those languages or you'll end up frustrated with very slow apps and bloated code.
lingo... overload (Score:2, Interesting)
Seems like every post mentions some form of standards or framework, and everyone wants to standardize everything within a framework. Or perhaps make a framework which will help standardize everything. I can't stop saying standards framework.......standards framework..... I miss the old days when "ware" was the hot term.. webware..awareware..opencourseware..cookware..
On topic.. Php is just so much more fun then Java... (excep
Here we go... (Score:2, Insightful)
J2EE has a very well-respected place in larger organizations. The support is fantastic, the tools are fantastic, and the language is actually very nice, once you truly get to know it.
I used to think that Java was slow and useless, but when I actually started writing a lot of it, I found that its really not as bad as everyone told me it woul
Re:Here we go... (Score:2)
Re:Here we go... (Score:2)
Oh you really made the case for Java here... "You don't like Java? How can you? It's the new COBOL! Everybody's loving it!"
PHP, or Ruby? (Score:3, Insightful)
I've certainly found Rails to be a good fit with interfacing with a Jabber PostgreSQL backend [blogs.com]. Good times!
Apples and Oranges? (Score:3, Insightful)
Bitter (Score:2, Interesting)
PHP wins - it's economics (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm talking about the network effects [wikipedia.org] of PHP being available on every shared host in the world.
Try to find a cheap, reliable tomcat hosting service. Then throw a dart at a google search for "web hosting." You'll find that outside of enterprise, PHP is the lingua franca.
So if you're a poor student or struggling entrepreneur looking to make an experiment or prototype, you will naturally gravitate toward PHP (same argument works for mySQL/postgre v the world). And guess who will populate the next gen of enterprise?
Re:PHP wins - it's economics (Score:3, Insightful)
But now I use Java, because I think it's much easier to work with, when you have teams of more than two people. PHP gives you too much freedom to be easily managed. It's nice for experimenting, for stuff you want to see right away, for complex stuff
PHP Succeeds Because It's Not Overkill (Score:4, Insightful)
PHP is procedurally oriented, works well, and -- most important -- is free. I can't convince my boss to touch it, of course, but if some names get behind it, it might become a much easier sell.
Java vs PHP development (Score:5, Informative)
All that aside, we typically use PHP for all web-based applications. The ease of coding, and the ability to affect change with zero downtime is a big plus. We can have several programmers affecting changes in one codebase in real time. And, for a program which took us six months to develop in PHP, it would have taken at least fifty percent longer with Java.
Re:Java vs PHP development (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure why you think
a) this is a good idea to do in PHP, and
b) this can't be done in Java.
And, for a program which took us six months to develop in PHP, it would have taken at least fifty percent longer with Java.
And now it will take you at least two hundred percent as much time to maintain.
the best thing about java is... (Score:2)
The Zend announcement of a technology to rival .NET and java might change the picture though.
very biased article (Score:5, Insightful)
I find the comparison that the article makes between them is very one dimensional, it's saying that PHP is better than JSP, which I suppose is debatable (I prefer JSP
I won't try and say Java is better (because of my limited PHP experience) but if an author wants to convince me that PHP is better than Java, it's going to have to talk about more than simplicity and hype.
Let's send an in email (Score:2, Insightful)
This is an API complaint, not a language complaint (Score:4, Interesting)
Mailer.mail(to,from,subject,message,header1
Many java frameworks are terrible, but that's a matter of API aesthetic. For instance, I hate the Java frameworks' APIs for reflection and dynamic method invocation and such. So I wrap it all in two methods
public boolean canPerformMethod(String methodSignature);
public Object performMethod(String methodSignature,Object param1
(Note: the above is pseudo-code so I don't have to explain how to do variable number of parameters in Java 5 - not all
(Note2: By using aspect-oriented programming, I can insert these methods high-up in the object-hierarchy)
The point is that now, anywhere in my code I can dynamically invoke methods by:
Foo result = null;
if (target.canPerformMethod("processFoo:String:Foo")
result = (Foo)target.performMethod("method:String:Foo","Pr
}
That simple structure replaces about 10-20 lines of exception handling, method lookup, and all sorts of crap, because I (wait for it) encapsulated it.
I'm not saying it's not convenient to have mail(...). Of course it is. But the point of languages like Java is that if you have a preferred API, you can wrap the complexity of a crappy API with a nicer convenient one in your own code. That's called good programming. No actualy need to whine.
It's only when the raw functionality is not there, or when the raw langauge/runtime capabilities don't actually allow you to create the functionality you want in a convenient form - that's when whining is necessary. But modern Java, with Java 5 + aspectJ pretty much allows anything to be created in relatively convenient APIs.
The only remaining issue is to convince someone at Sun to refactor their core APIs into something that provides some of this convenience out-of-the-box. Or go write Objective-C against the Cocoa APIs on MacOSX. They're pretty nice.
Success through lack of hype (Score:3, Interesting)
- it's used on its merits, not because of hype, or a New Gospel of Platform Independence
- it's simpler and faster
- it's not being touted by a huge company such that it shows up on MS's radar as a challenge
sun death wish (Score:2)
For instance, in order to install Java so that you could use a java app on the web you had to go to their web site and hunt around to find the download, even then you had to choose between whether you wanted to download the Java SQW1.2 or ZXY4.2 - it was as if they didn't really want normal people to be able to use it. Java was an amazing opportunit
flamebait! (Score:2, Insightful)
"wooing windows programmers" ?? (Score:2)
That ended when they stopped including QBasic and started selling VB for $100-$700.
For a neat example of what PHP can do (Score:2)
this is sad (Score:4, Informative)
Hey, i'm just as annoyed at java and
I risk being tagged elitist, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
PHP is and will be continue to be popular with the masses simply because, like HTML, the entry barrier is very low. It will fail to make deep inroads at the high end for the same reason: The entry barrier is very low.
Sounds like a contradiction? Not really. The entry barrier for PHP is so low that we are seeing zillions of poorly written, insecure and unscalable PHP apps written by amateur programmers. Resulting in numerous security scares about PHP and contributing more than slightly to the infamous Slashdot Effect where a site that gets a sudden traffic surge craters as it runs out not of datapipe but simple CPU power. This scares the hell out of anyone who considers using PHP in the enterprise.
Don't get me wrong: It is possible to write good, secure, scalable code in PHP. It just isn't very common.
PHP: good for admins, not so good for developers (Score:4, Interesting)
PHP is good for an admin to set up some forum, photo gallery, database administration front end, a CMS, whatever tool you can download form sourceforge and install in a few hours to give users/customers a service.
When you need to develop a solution with specific needs and there's no tool to download and use right off the shelf, PHP gives you lots of headaches.
The API changes a lot, very fast. This is not good. From PHP 3.0 to 4.0 things break and new stuff gets added so fast some sites have to keep using PHP 3 in order to avoid spending many hours recoding old code. Now PHP 5 is a new language altogether.
Lots of changes are for good since PHP was really bad in some areas in early version so the rewrote everything form scratch, that forces developers to relearn and recode.
The lack of abstraction in the PHP API leaves lots of stuff to the developer. For example, working with HTTP headers. The header function just sends whatever header you send in. You have to account for browser bugs on your code and maitain that. The manual is full of user comments regarding how to use certain function that give different results with different databases, browsers, platforms, Apache configurations, etc. Those things don't belong to API, there are bugs, but you have to work around them in your code.
If you use a PHP CMS or a PHP forum, you know the people developping it will do the dirty work for you and release a quality product, but for a small organization with a few programers, migrating from PHP3 to PHP5 to get the new cool stuff they implemented is hard, painful and takes a lot of debugging time.
In contrast Java has managed to keep backwards compatibility while adding new functionality and the API has been quite stable. Of course it has bugs, migration problems and imcompatibilities, but the java developers (SUN, Apache foundation, IBM, etc) make an effort to make developers' life easier. The PHP developers also try, but are less sucessful.
At the same time in Java you don't have such a wide selection of free tools ready to use in a web site, but you do have tons and tons of libraries ready to be integrated in your java web app, which PHP has but in much smaller quantity.
Java never seemed intregrated with the browser (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the answer to "it's not fast enough" always seemed to involve a very heavy, expensive machine from Sun. Hrmm.
Microsoft's solutions always seemed inelegant to me.
PHP always was, and is, about making web applications and database interfaces very efficiently.
Why is it suprising then, that it would be adopted?
web apps all have the same problem: the browser (Score:5, Insightful)
Web apps all have the same problem. They use a goddamn BROWSER as the application platform. This sucks.
I'm looking at a typical jsp right now. Its an awful demoralizing conflation of xml, css, jstl, html, and javascript-- all in one file. As developer, it sucks to work with and it is a major hassle to create a nice user experience with this trash y stuff.
I have not worked with PHP, but looking at the source from the browser page, I imagine the same problems apply.
Whatever happened to the "applet" concept? True, there were problems with it initially, but one would think that these problems could have been solved by now. Instead, the industry turned away from nice clean designs to the brutal mess that is today's web app.
As a Java developer with PHP experience... (Score:5, Insightful)
I feel like there's a lack of standardized libraries for PHP. I've used PearDB, but it's sure not ActiveRecord or Hibernate. Smarty's o.k., but I'm already developing in a template language for HTML pages, why do I need another one? It's like working with JSP tag libraries (which I find equally wasteful).
Fundamentally, I think the tight coupling between view, controller, and model that PHP naturally engenders is bad. Practically, I've seen where Ruby on Rails has gone in just a single year, and it's further than PHP's gone in the last 5. Things you can do in Rails in a few days take weeks of coding in PHP, even with the help of third-party libraries.
PHP has a strong foothold with small, inexpensive ISPs, which is the only reason I think that people still use it. Unfortunately, the "war" between 4 and 5 has really hurt the credibility of PHP moving forward. Does any ISP support PHP 5?
If PHP wants to compete against Ruby on the low end and J2EE and
Since When Has Java Failed? (Score:4, Interesting)
Try doing this [verosystems.com] in PHP.
There is a reason that eBay handles 1 billion transactions a day on Java.
Re:Since When Has Java Failed? (Score:5, Funny)
Because they run it on a million servers?
Parallel universe? (Score:4, Funny)
Fact: PHP was released on June 8, 1995 [wikipedia.org].
Fact: The Java Servlet spec (first server-side Java) was released over 4 years later on October 1, 1999 [sun.com].
After 5 years, Java as caught up with and far surpassed PHP in terms of usage, tools, maturity, etc. Java is showing no signs of slowing down. I don't know what iPlanet Marc is on, but on my planet, if you want to do any server-side web programming, you better know J2EE or .NET.
Also funny was this quote from TFA:
Uh, yeah, Marc. That falls solidly in to the category of "thing we wish were true but aren't." I wish Flash wasn't so popular, but the fact is it's used very heavily.It's getting there, but it has its problems (Score:3, Informative)
PHP may have a bunch of issues, but it's still the best tool for my job.
Have to chime in here as a new Railer... (Score:3, Informative)
I've started my first small-scale Ruby on Rails [rubyonrails.com] project, having done work in the past in ASP,
1) RoR may be highly buzz-worthy but it is certainly NOT a panacea. It has a definite and slightly steep learning curve, especially if you are also new to Ruby and/or OOP and/or MVC (I am sort of but not completely new to all of these). You will still have to do the work of developing your application- you just won't have to do the "stupid" kind of work that much (repeating code in views, bubbling new database fields through umpteen app tiers to the surface of your app, hand-validating everything, building a mechanism to bubble errors or notifications to the surface, etc. etc.)
That said...
2) I can see that if I can get past the little syntactic things that are currently tripping me up, a lot of the RoR technology (and all the assistance its framework provides, once you get to know it... again, that takes time) helps to make web development a breeze.
3) MVC [google.com] certainly seems like a pattern to seriously consider for anything other than a small web app. Mixing code in the presentation layer is not the way to go if you want easy unit testing, separation of view from code (so your graphic designers can go in and do their thing separately), arbitrary mixing of controller code with different views, etc.
4) Ruby itself is a pretty great language to code in and highly readable. It has a few quirks (doesn't every language?) but if you are aware of them then they won't get in your way. Some of the things I like about it were apparently "borrowed" from Perl (as I never really got that into Perl). If you are not a static-typing purist, I'd say check it out on its own.
5) Installing some Ruby/Rails components that depend on each other is not at ALL as painless as it should be on OS X. For example, I'm currently having issues with RMagick and GraphicsMagick even though I followed a guide [poocs.net] I found online, to the letter. I think the darwinports, fink, and rubygems people should get together and work some shit out, as all the different default paths these packaging/deployment tools install their stuff to causes mutual interdependencies to sometimes fail. I've also seen some MySQL issues that will require good troubleshooting to resolve, for some people- some of it is based on incompatibilities with GCC 4.0, or between the password hashes of different MySQL versions, or... Basically, this is all stuff that as a Rails scripter (as opposed to a C++ programmer) you wouldn't want to focus too much time on. If you want to know what I'm talking about just google "rmagick 'os x'" or "mysql rails 'os x'" and read up. That said, if you can get a good host [textdrive.com] with good Ruby/Rails support, you might not need to worry about such things... Unless you want to develop locally on that shiny Powerbook (grrrr). You better be a good troubleshooter, as Google won't get you out of EVERY bind!
6) The people on the #rubyonrails IRC channel on freenode are generally helpful, but not at all hours of the day. It also helps if you put up small PayPal rewards to get someone to help you over those time-sensitive humps
7) Managers at big corporations (such as my employer) who have been out of direct touch with technology for a while will only tend to recommend the "usual big stuff"- in this case Java/EJB/Oracle, or
Silly argument (Score:3, Informative)
The setup I use is basically the J2EE model, except I get the best of all worlds, because I can access code written in any language seemlessly, use n-tier architecture without even thinking about it, use advanced cacheing libraries available in the higher end/heavier languages, and because the backend code is running as a daemon running a soap or xml-rpc server, I sidestep the whole perl/python interpretter startup bottleneck.
It's not about which language is "best" its about what tool gets the job done.
What about the long run? (Score:5, Interesting)
When I work with PHP, I find it a pain to work with, because of its apparent lack of design. It feels like a cobbled-together heap of features and hacks, and so does the code written in it. I tend to write cleaner code than what I've seen from other people, but that doesn't make the final product any less messy when various people have worked on it.
Neither language is absolutely horrible; comparing them to others, Java is a language with a relatively clean design, and PHP is a good choice in its niche of writing web applications. However, my pain in working with these languages is a direct result of these languages being poorly designed. I'm into programming languages, and I know many that have better designs than Java and PHP. I wonder if these languages won't take over in the future.
Some changes are happening already. Various organizations are moving away from Java for web applications, and I know others that would do well to do so as well. Much of the work that went into PHP 5 comes from a realization that earlier versions were flawed (the same can be said of Perl 6). Ruby appears to be on the rise. Paul Graham and others have had good results employing Common Lisp for web applications.
The only thing I can see standing in the way of better languages taking over the web application sphere is the fact that the decision making process is based more on fame than on qualities. I maintain that Java has become so successful largely because of the enormous hype surrounding it. PHP, Linux and MySQL have also risen largely due to hype. Of course, it's true that you won't overly disadvantage yourself if you use whatever most others use, but it would still be better if decisions were made based on sound knowledge of technical benefits.
Programming tools? (Score:3, Insightful)
> regarded programming tools, which make it easier for
> developers to write software that run on Windows.
Bleh. Windows doesn't even come with a compiler.
I think that's probably why a lot of developers like Unix so much - most systems come with a compiler as standard and the man pages give you all the APIs you need. Grab your favourite editor and off you go!
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
J2EE Sucks (Score:5, Funny)
C Coders perspective:
PHP - I wrote some objects for PHP5 about eight months ago. The documentation blows, I had to use gdb and a notepad to figure out some of the idiotic details for accessing the symbol table and so forth. The Horrible, horrible dangling-if-macros are terrible. Took 3 days (from "I know nothing" to "I'm done and debugged").
Java - I wrote some JNI interfaces. Actually, they interfaced to the exact same code as the PHP5 modules! (Making a useful C library, encapsulated in C++ objects usable across Java and PHP platforms). Easy stuff! I used cxxwrap. Took 1 day.
Manager's Perspective (I wear that hat, too): PHP is pretty cool, as long as you treat it like a programming language and perform proper data abstraction, code layout, blah-de-blah. "Web guys" need to learn awful fast that "Web Programming" had better be treated the same was as system programming, or large applications become difficult to manage. PHP does little to enforce this (hey, just stick some code right in the middle of the style sheet!), but good discipline will solve all of PHP's major problems.
It's also nice when PHP the guys ask for help, I say "C library function XXXX will solve your problem" or "the underlying OS call behaves this way, that's probably why you're having issues..." and it transliterates directly into PHP. (And I can look at the PHP sources and actually understand them).
Java, on the other hand -- I can't take my years of experience with the UNIX OS and help anybody coding on Java, because it has absolutely nothing in common with the underlying OS, POSIX, etc. Now, that may not be all that bad, but it's damned frustrating when you plan on doing common, every day operations that work anywhere else BUT Java, and have the platform smacks you in the face.
For example, say you need to link two different web hierarchies together (say, images from your apache server and the same images in your tomcat container). You'd make a software link, right? OH, NOOOOO, you make a soft link and then you spend the next three hours figuring out why the fuck it doesn't work, because those asshats who designed the platform didn't like them, so you instead have to hunt through cryptic XML configuration files to find out how to turn on some asshat undocumented directive to allow a BASIC FUNCTION OF THE OPERATING SYSTEM.
For fuck's sake! Now, I suppose the above criticism is more a J2EE criticism than a Java critism, but, if we want to compare apples to apples,
J2EE SUCKS HUGE DONKEY BALLS.
Essential redux: Each PHP guy gets more done in a day than two Java guys get done in a week.
Why? How can this be? Java solves everything except world hunger!
The Java guys spend three days a week debugging shit that's gone wrong with Tomcat on one server or another. It's always some incompatibility here, surprise-bite-you-in-the-ass-there. Two applications on the same server use the same JAR file, so the containers refuse to load. That sort of thing. Sheer idiocy.
Then they spend one day debugging shit that's gone wrong with Eclipse (or its mangling of the CVS repository, or some ant dependency problem, or)... then they spend half a day each writing code, and another half day synchronizing their changes. And meanwhile they whine that 256 megs of RAM isn't enough to edit a fucking text file (and do NOTHING else at the same time).
And Lord help you if you want to add another table to the database and want them to do something as silly as retrieve the data from it and put it on a web page. Apparently, this is incredibly difficult, because it involves creating new hibernate objects, which of course fucks everything else in the ass, well, because, something called hotspot didn't get it's monthly fucking hormone shot or som
Re:Java failed because it's a slow toy. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:PHP can do allot (Score:5, Informative)
Re:PHP can do allot (Score:3, Informative)
Two
Re:Ajax? (Score:2)
This, of course, applies since PHP (and also many other "scripting languages") is actually not "three" or "n-tier-oriented".
Re:Cliche Elitist Reply (Score:4, Insightful)
* PHP sucks.
PHP has functions for practically anything you can imagine. Of course, I'll get into why it doesn't suck in the replies below, as this is a bit too general.
* PHP is for n00bs.
PHP is for developers who want to get something done quickly. The syntax is very easy to learn, and variables are loosely typed, but in my experience this doesn't mean that the language is flawed; it means that one can code up something without having to worry about unnecessary things like pointers, variable conversion and the like. And to be honest, in website scripting I've never come across a need for more advanced syntax than PHP provides in my five or more years of using it.
* PHP is usually poorly written.
This, unfortunately, is usually true. Because PHP is easy to use, it is often used by people who don't want to worry about writing good code either. But like everything else, there are varying grades of professionalism. PHP *can* be written well, it's just a case of taking the time to do so.
* PHP is a scripting language and you can't do anything but write web pages with it.
Scripting language, yes. But it most certainly can [php.net] be used for things other than websites.
* PHP sucks because the function names are inconsistent.
True, but this is why one has a manual. I've never been all that concerned about it.
* PHP is slow.
Actually, it's really not. Take a look at this comparison between different CGI modules for Apache [dmst.aueb.gr]: PHP actually outdoes Perl here.
* PHP isn't capable of working in a real enterprise.
I haven't had experience with integrating PHP into an "enterprise" situation personally, but I'll refer you to Zend's Enterprise PHP [zend.com] page for various reasons why PHP is indeed ready for the enterprise.
* Real coders use Perl.
Real coders use the tool that best fits the problem.
* PHP doesn't scale.
Now THIS is something I can definitely refute. I work for a company that creates mods for a PHP / Smarty-based online shopping cart known as X-Cart [x-cart.com] and I can tell you, PHP scales wonderfully, otherwise stores wouldn't use it as a base of their business operations. X-Cart is on the order of hundreds of thousands of lines of PHP code, and very commonly has tens of thousands of customers accessing it concurrently.
And yeah, I know you were joking, but hey, I was bored.
Re:Native compiled PHP with a widget set? (Score:3, Informative)