Brigitte Jellinek did a very good talk at the German Perl Workshop comparing perl and php. I forwarded her Simon's message, and she's kindly answered some of the questions he asked. I hope that this is useful.
It seems that I have failed to assimilate her onto the london.pm list. :-( This time. Muahahahahaha. Nicholas Clark ----- Forwarded message from Brigitte Jellinek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----- Received: from edfu.horus.com ([193.83.27.2]) by plum.flirble.org with esmtp (Exim 3.20 #3) id 18t624-0009mq-00 for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Wed, 12 Mar 2003 13:12:32 +0000 Received: by edfu.horus.com (Postfix, from userid 1003) id 562145BB72; Wed, 12 Mar 2003 14:12:35 +0100 (CET) Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 14:12:35 +0100 From: Brigitte Jellinek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Nicholas Clark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: your talk at DPW comparing PHP with perl Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> References: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.28i On Wed, Mar 12, 2003 at 12:32:22PM +0000, Nicholas Clark wrote: > There's a thread developing on the london.pm list about how to make and > distribute applications in perl, and questions are being asked about > how PHP does it. I've tried to answer Simons message below, feel free to forward it. > I can't remember what they were offhand. I also remember that > you gave a URL for a site, but I wrote that down on my conference abstract > book, which is at home. I've not found the site using google - could you > remind me of the URL? the only URLs I remember giving are http://www.php.net <-- general php site http://perlwelt.horus.at/ <-- my perl stuff http://phpwelt.horus.at/perl/ <-- sample programs from the talk ============ > > Rightly or wrongly, I suspect the reason why people like the php* family > > if web apps are popular is because all you have to do is untar the > > distributions, chmod a+rx and away you go. you don't even need the chmod. *.php files don't need execute permissions to be interpreted by mod_php. > Agreed. Does php have the same central-local installation pattern that > perl does ? I suspect that all php code is installed locally to the > user/website that's using it, whereas perl has a root-only central > installation location for most modules. that's one of the reasons why installing php apps is so simple. my understanding is: in php there is a clear seperation of a) extentions to the php engine - only these are written in c b) php applications - written in pure php, no c at all ad a) Extentions are installed and configured centrally, and available as binaries. they can only be installed by person running the webserver. php comes with a long list of extentions, so there isn't much need for installing them later on. ad b) There are practically *no* libraries written in php that are installed centrally so that they can be used by several applications. They are trying to set up PEAR, an imitation of CPAN, http://pear.php.net/ but all the successfull applications out there don't use it (yet). so installing an applications never concerns anything outside it own directory. no make, no c-compiler, no perl^H^H^H^Hphp header files, no modules needed. -- Brigitte 'I never met a chocolate I didnt like' Jellinek [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.horus.com/~bjelli/ http://perlwelt.horus.at http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node=bjelli ----- End forwarded message -----