When Java? When PHP?
In a recent interview, Doron Gerstel, CEO of Zend Technologies has made some interesting comments on PHP and Java. He also tells us why he think PHP 5 is enterprise ready.
He says
"We hear from customers often that what would have taken them 3-4 months to develop in Java for instance took them a couple of weeks in PHP. When time-to-market is important, this type of time savings is extremely important."
"If the application that is being built is a dynamic Web application then the P is PHP [in the LAMP stack of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl or PHP]. Java is very good for heavy transactional, complex applications. PHP’s forte is dynamic Web applications."
"PHP 5 provides to enterprise developers all they need to support the way they develop with the technologies they use."
"PHP 5 is very definitely enterprise-ready."
Reference:
>> FYI: Zend CEO covers PHP basics
>> Zend Technologies: The PHP company
>> Why Choose PHP?
Related:
>>
LAMP alternative to J2EE and .Net
>> IBM backs PHP
I’m in charge of a team that has spent several years developing a comercial site in PHP4. We now need to get to PHP5. Did the PHP development team help me by making the transition possible with minimal pain?
No. Instead, they changed the language in such fundamental ways that we cannot be confident that any of our codebase will work as it did before.
What happens when PHP6 comes? I simply don’t trust this language to look after me. Java however has a history of trying to make such transitions straightforward.
We will be moving to Java. I think the pain of that move will be only slightly worse than moving to PHP5.
We have experianced PHP is best for fast development as well as for modification in future.
If application is developed with fully documented and structured then its so stable.
:grin
PHP developers are like laborers who work real cheap and therefore, working together, can be more cost effective than paying the expensive operators of a fancy machine that does the same thing. This is why PHP works.
I don’t see anything here about developing regular applications and their web equivalents in parallel. This is not possible with PHP because you can’t create a regular application with PHP. Another thing is PHP code is obsolete after 1 year. Java code will be here forever because the language was well planned and by an absolute genius. If you develop in PHP you’d have to change your code to make use of new features as they become available. This costs money.
I hate people who use PHP and create wrapper functions and template systems and then call that MVC. PHP is the template system. When you wrap a template system with a template system you are an idiot who doesn’t know java.
I have seen a lot of commands about PHP and Java..
I am a beginner …
One thing that NetBeans, at least last time I checked, still lacks is good F1 context sensitive help. One thing MS does very well is put good help at the fingertips of developers and I have yet to see a Java tool that could truly match it.
I develop since PHP 2 and I have seen all kinds of messy code, expecially by consultants.
Same for Java, you can code awfully too.
In the end it’s the coder who does the mess, not the tools he uses. Expecially with PHP 5 the OO programming is modern and comparable to Java.
I’d say that PHP is very good at getting the job done and fast (this is really a big push to use it) and is good at integrating heterogeneous applications, while Java is ‘heavier’ to overall manage and deploy (and costs tend to be bigger) but is good at integrating at a finer level with legacy applications.
i dont think PHP was a messy programming language its very cool to use especially when you was able to integrate PDF. Its not PHP that was messy its the person who codes it who was messy. Good for you to understand what was messy in others people code because thats a good sign that you are being an OO coder
I have about 8 years of java experience and 5 years of PHP experience. I love working in both langauges.
If development time is critical and the web app doesn’t need to integrate with existing code then PHP is a very good choice.
Using PHP 5 can help a lot with code maintenance and messiness. I now use classes (and exception based error handling) for the majority of my PHP code. The OO abilities of PHP is not as powerful as Java but for web based apps it has all of the important things you need.
One last thing I like about PHP… when you make a change to a file and re-fresh the web page, the change is instantly seen. There’s no JSP to recompile or anythng to re-deploy. This is a small time saver but its something I’ve always liked about PHP.
Its also easy to write messy code in ASP.
For last two years I worked on a web application which is written in PHP, with custom built Struts-like framework and now working on another Web application (J2EE with struts framework), tell you what, I do not feel much difference when it comes to being messy. Both are equally messy.
However I still feel PHP is easier to setup, develop and fix then J2EE.
I find it odd to compare PHP to JSP, I’m statistics guy I see here and everywhere else a lot more PHP people. Popular opinion always rules, PHP is a stronger majority, but that is not what we are trying to compare, we are really asking is PHP extensible enough to take on the strange variety and mischmasch that occurs in business. Even if it can how quickly and cheaply can we do this. For a while I was using php in it’s original procedural manner, not using any packages etc. The code looked like horrendous, but lately I’ve using the ‘best practises’ that have been created, I still have the same performance, but more power and better yet even my web designers can understand what is going on in the (x)html pages. I’m also planning a major increase in the market I produce for, not just quickie shops and forums but also business information needs and specialized technology incorparation. So is PHP enterprise ready, I think so, is still great for quickie shops and forums, definitely, is JSP better, well if it is then a lot of people here have been walking down the wrong path
We use both Java and PHP. Java is great for the heavy lifting but the development cycle is so slow. PHP is very easy…AND FAST. We sometimes mock up a new app in PHP and then rewrite in Java once 90% of the requirements are ironed out. We envision running PHP for GUI with Java objects. Hopefully this will be a good marriage. Please don’t ask about JSP – the bane of web programming!
PHP’s power lies in its simplicity. In an effort to match Java and be so called enterprise ready, unfortunately we will soon see things like patterns, frameworks, complex practices that will be termed as ‘best practices’ even in PHP.
Then PHP will lose its edge over Java as it would then be just as complex as the unnecessary and complex mess that exists in Java today
we actually are working on both worlds, Java is for our enterprise systems, and PHP is for some intranet portal (tiki), I review a lot of php open source programas, and they’re very difficult to follow because they don’t use any pattern, like MVC or MVC2, they looks like ASP..very messy language…On java, at least you could follow patterns..we actually use MVC2, jsp, ejb on weblogic and jboss, and on future hibernate…
Im sick of everyone comparing languages to one another, why don’t you just use what you are comfortable with and get the job done.
If it works, it works, and everyone is happy 😀
🙂
[B]null[/B]
A programming language is as good as the developer who makes use of it. You can write terrible, unmanageable code in Java and clean, well structured code in PHP and vice versa. In the same manner, if you create a stable system or not depends mostly on your skills and not the implementation language.
Most of the negative comments regarding PHP being too messy or hard to maintain are made by biased individuals who more than likely only use Java. They’re only experience is minimal and with popular PHP apps that are downloaded from sourceforge or freshmeat and to be honest, yes, much of that code is messy…. really messy…. you have several developers working on those projects, each with their own style…
We’re talking about ENTERPRISE applications here, not open source apps that have several part time developers… more than likely, in the Enterprise arena, you have (some) time to design your application ahead of time, and hopefully with a good team of Business Analysts and proper requirements… and if you have real PHP developers, you’ll have a very stable, documented, and easily maintanable application. PHP with something like Smarty or PHPTal or PEAR, is ideal for a scalable dynamic web applications. I’ve seen several Java based web applications using things like Struts, Weblogic Netui-tags, etc, and man, that stuff looks as crappy as some PHP applications I’ve seen and had taken twice the time to develop when compared to a PHP solution.
So this notion about PHP not being ‘enterprise ready’ is all bias bologny put out by Java zealots and vendor employees… Once you get past all the marketing puff put out by vendors, PHP is a very competent alternative… If you disagree, I would like to ask what your _real_ experience with PHP is? Not just a 2 week project because you know you weren’t a Java expert in 2 weeks or after one project…
–Jonathan Villa
PHP was written to build web applications. There are a lot of functions that do everything you need.
Is much more easy to process html content through PHP.
When your app needs to do a more strong job, you can easily write libraries( using C, Java, Vb…) and get it working through web services, COM, or Java support.
I think that the statement that java is too heavy or takes too long to build dynamic websites is caused by both J2EE server vendors and most developers. As the previous commenter mentioned, one can just as easily write a java web app using nothing but JSP; no Struts, JSF, WebWork, EJB, JMS, etc. etc. just pure JSP and maybe some taglibs if that is your liking. The result would be a JSP equivalent of either a PHP app or a ASP app.
However, the vendors want you to buy their most expensive server product and therefore have claimed to companies that they need the entire J2EE stack when all most companies need is a servlet container and something like Resin, Jetty or even Tomcat would suffice. And then the vendors all get together and wonder why they can’t compete against Microsoft’s .Net/VisualStudio. You don’t see Microsoft telling everyone that they need .Net, MTS and MSMQ to run every app do you?
php files seem too messed up for my liking.
JSP files if they make proper use of tag libraries are so much better, cleaner and easier to understand.
If you have to support an application for 5 years, use Java properly. If you deliver, get paid and don’t have anything to do with the app later on, most certainly use PHP as the dev time does signigficantly come down.
the difference is obvious, simple works PHP, works but heavy JAVA, the security is important also, and for what heard PHP doesn’t convince