Article:		The PHP Scalability Myth
Subject:		maintainability is king
Date:		2003-10-17 16:45:36
From:		anonymous2
"I need to reduce the term scalability to its core concern: performance" With that statement, the article went from interesting to uninteresting. Performance is not really that important. There will always be faster machines with more RAM. You can load balance across machines, that is not really a language issue, although some support it better than others. Maintainability is the key to any large software development project. If you have 100,000 lines or code in a mid-sized project, you definately want a language that provides the best concepts and tools to manage that complexity. I am not a PHP user. I believe that PHP is behind Java in maintainability, but I don't know PHP well enough to compare them point by point, and I may consider using PHP on a future project so I want to know how far it is behind. How does PHP compare to java's packages, jar files, war files, import statement, class visibility, interfaces, reflection, javadocs, UML tools, etc. Now that would be a more useful article.

Showing messages 1 through 17 of 17.

• maintainability is king
  2003-10-18 03:01:40  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  There's a philosophical and a practical answer to that.
  
  On the practical front, PHP doesn't have such a mature set of development tools and there's still a fair amount of work to do on encapsulating common architectural issues in some form of re-usable package - PEAR is getting there although there's still some lessons to learn in re-use (PEAR is closer to CPAN right now than a well integrated class library). PHP5 is also needed to make things like error handling more uniform.
  
  On the philosophical front, there's a different school of thought coming from an eXtreme programming angle which argues that static, compile time type checks are merely a subset of unit testing and don't bring you much closer to a bug free application. Bruce Eckel makes the case in Strong Typing vs Strong Testing. For a PHP unit test framework (there's a few), try Simple Test.

• maintainability is king
  2003-10-17 19:16:37  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  I'll save you some time. PHP really sucks for projects more than a few pages. I'll briefly explain. It is about as far from concepts like type-safe as it could be made. Cute syntactic tricks are much more important (at least on the day you code your first program). Why do the PHP language developers bother saying that they added a function to the language if they aren't going to unambiguously document the damn thing?? Because the PHP team is entrenched with a screw-safety mindset and mean-spirited arrogance. If they weren't coding PHP they'd be creating viruses and stealing credit cards so I suppose we should be thankful. Zend was hatched from the same cesspool -- bug-laden crapware and rampant dishonesty from all angles.
  
  This is the truth and readers, you have been warned.
• maintainability is king, author is queen
  2003-10-20 08:31:13  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  seems to me like you have some personal axe to grind here...
  
  Yahoo!, SourceForge.net, Lufthansa.com, Deutche Bank - they all run PHP and I dare say all these are "projects more than a few pages".
  
• maintainability is king, author is queen
  2003-10-20 15:51:29  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  "author is queen"
  cute :)
  
  "seems to me like you have some personal axe to grind here..."
  Correct. It became personal for the reasons I've given.
  
  "Yahoo!, SourceForge.net, Lufthansa.com, Deutche Bank - they all run PHP"
  It can be done with a good debugger but much better alternatives exist, which is the point of this discussion.
  
  For the record, such as it is, I'm brainbench master certified in PHP.
• maintainability is king, author is queen
  2003-10-25 15:35:27  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  This has GOT to be a troll. :-)
  
  That last sentence gave it away.
• maintainability is king, author is queen
  2003-10-23 09:59:42  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  People who have to tell eveveryone what they're certified in tend to be completely incompetent in my experience. Certified means you studied for a test. It doesn't mean you *know* a damn thing--which your other arguments seem to support. Write some code first (more than a few pages) before you start to shoot your mouth off. Making a vast over generalization like this just makes you sound stupid. Then again, maybe you *are* stupid.
• maintainability is king
  2003-10-18 02:28:32  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  Why do the PHP language developers bother saying that they added a function to the language if they aren't going to unambiguously document the damn thing??
  
  So they can tell you to debugger_off() and die()
• maintainability is king
  2003-10-17 23:10:23  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  "Zend was hatched from the same cesspool -- bug-laden crapware and rampant dishonesty from all angles."
  
  Gee, that sounds a lot like Microsoft. You're running Windows, I bet.
• maintainability is king
  2003-10-18 05:45:29  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  I'm running alot of things, including PHP. I invested literally years of my life in a PHP system and as a result I am now married to it.
  
  One of the worst decisions I have ever made.
  
  PHP is a gift horse I advise everyone to look carefully in the mouth before placing their bets, elsewhere.
• maintainability is king
  2003-10-21 02:32:43  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  I'm replying to my post to clarify: I will re-write my PHP apps in other languages when I can now that multi-billion $ competitors have passed me by, but I'm now married to PHP in another way, as PHP is the freshest item on my resume. I've found that skill in this language is shockingly unsaleable compared with things like Java. Check out the help wanteds if you don't believe me. Employers have told me that they look for skills in a more substantive language, like C or Perl, even if the position will be mostly PHP programming because the last is a considerably simpler, derivative language.
  
  If you've been pretty focused on PHP development for a while, your other skills may now be at least a version behind. If you develop a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the language on top of this don't be surprised that this reveals itself at interview. You may then find manning the proverbial hot dog stand looming rather large in your future. The fresh air may do you good but the point remains: think of the children before choosing PHP. :) Somehow that's not as funny on second reading.
  
  Yes, I program alot better in other languages (particularly with a good IDE and clear documentation) but either I'm from Mars or this would be the general experience for the reasons already stated.
• maintainability is king
  2003-10-24 08:15:04  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  PHP is not highly complex, and it is highly specialized. PHP was meant to be a web programming language. Perl was meant to be a text manipulation language and a general workhorse. Java was built to be a multi-platform development language. PHP as a web dev language is fantastic -- lots of web-related functionality built-in. Perl has that functionality as Perl Modules, adding on complexities which are not compiled into the language. Java has the same thing -- lots of modules and such that need to be added in to make coding for the web easier and less complex.
  
  True, PHP can't do the millions of tricks that perl and java can do outside of the web world. But PHP can do most everything that a web developer needs to do, and it does it natively. It wouldn't make sense to implement a web server in PHP (although I suppose it might be possible), but it might in Perl or Java. It might be difficult to write an AIM client in PHP, but not so difficult in Perl or Java; but then again, Perl and Java are generalists whereas PHP is very specifically for web development.
  
  If you are doing pure web development, using a language written specifically with that task in mind makes sense. If you are doing some major huge task that encompasses lots of non-web-related work, it would make more sense to use a more general language.
  
  I also agree that PHP gives you a limitation in job opportunities. While PHP is a good language for web development, if that's all you know, you can't understand the general aspects of perl or java, and potentially not know things about typecasting or the problems with declaring everything global. I did perl for 5 years, then PHP for the last 4, and while I don't think my programming skills have suffered, I can't say that they have improved significantly since I've been out of the perl pool.
  
  I program for the web best in PHP because PHP was built for that task; I do other non-web things in perl.
• maintainability is king
  2003-12-09 11:31:12  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  If you are doing pure web development, using a language written specifically with that task in mind makes sense. If <small>yo</small>u are doing some major huge task that encompasses lots of non-web-related work, it would make more sense to use a more general language.
• maintainability is king
  2003-10-20 01:06:32  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  Any language is "one of the worst decisions" you've ever made if you don't take time to properly learn how to use it. In most cases, those who are fanatically opposed to certain languages have had a bad experience with it primary because they were inadaquate programmers and not because the language was lacking. I can name hundreds of "great, experienced programers" who think C is a woefully inadaquate language to develop software in. Would you say they're right or is it more likely that the problem lies in their skills?
  
  A bad programmer is a bad programmer. A bad programmer will produce crappy code in any language. The usual out for these programmers is never their inadaquate skills but rather "the language is crappy".
  
  I've developed software -- high end software -- for both private industry and government in Java, PHP, and C. I've developed software in PHP using thousands of pages and I can tell you it CAN scale and it CAN handle complex applications. The problem isn't with the language. I can guarantee you that.
  
  Anthony
• maintainability is king
  2003-11-03 11:28:59  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  Right on....
  
  I've been in the industry for 30 years (12 as a Consultant) and have been developing Web pages in Java/JSP, ASP, and PHP.
  
  My favorite, PHP hands down. Powerful and maintainable.
  
  Just by the nature the organization of JAVA, it forces you to be organized. If you take that mentality when coding in PHP, you'll write structured and highly maintainable code. The choise is up to you.
  
  That is, if you're a talented enough of a programmer to recognize that you have that choice.
  
  Roy
• maintainability is king
  2004-11-18 16:18:47  Tablizer [View]
  
  
  Re: "Just by the nature the organization of JAVA, it forces you to be organized."
  
  Can you give an example? Messes can be made in Java just like anything. It appears to me that it often requires you to duplicate certain coding patterns to make stuff work, but a lot of it is also mindless beurocratic repetition for the sake of formality.
  
• maintainability is king
  2003-10-19 10:38:39  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  My experience has shown that those who dismiss a certain technology for "big" projects don't know the technology as well as they say they do.
  
  So, I'm calling your bluff. I bet you suck at PHP. :-)
• maintainability is king
  2003-10-23 10:05:38  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  I would bet he sucks at software design in general. No solution is viable regardless of language if you build it in such a way as to have no ability to maintain it easily. This guys is wasting all of our time. Read a design book, dude, and stop your whining.