Michael B Allen wrote:
My personal opinion is that if you're a Windows shop and you treat
software development like a logistical problem and you need to hire
and fire programmers like a commodity, then use Java. It's much more
forgiving than PHP. To be effective with PHP you must really
understand PHP well. If you're really good at PHP it can be much more
powerful than Java. Of course most people fall into the Windows
commodity programmer category and so I predict Java will be around for
a while. But PHP will continue to dominate with power programmers.
Mike
I'd say it's the opposite. Java's improved more in the last ten
years than PHP has (although PHP certainly has)
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2003/09/20/java-is-the-suv-of-programming-tools/
Back in 2003, Java Frameworks such as Struts were part of the
problem, not part of the solution. Much better frameworks exist
today, and there's much more of a "framework culture" that people
understand how to build apps well.
It's impossible to explain the power of the Eclipse/Java IDE to
anyone who works primarily in dynamic languages. I mean, it does
things that PHP IDEs can't even dream of doing: first of all, Eclipse
overcomes most of the verbosity of Java that makes Java painful to work
on. You can click on a 'create class' button and it creates a file in
the right place for the namespace it's in, fills in the headers and all
that. Renaming a class in Java is a big pain manually, but can be done
in two clicks in Eclipse: Eclipse renames all the instances of the
class, renames the file. Refactoring operations that could take a few
hours in PHP or in Java w/o an IDE can be done in under a minute... and
never a mistake.
What I'd really like is a less verbose language, like Scala, with
the good IDE. There's no reason Eclipse/Scala couldn't be as good as
Eclipse/Java, except that a lot of people just don't appreciate what an
advance Eclipse/Java is over vi.
It's much easier to be productive, at a low level, in PHP than it
is in Java.
I've given business people 1-day bootcamp training in PHP and that's
been enough for them to make small changes to their sites. Systems like
Smarty are a big waste of time in my opinion, since graphic designers
can quickly learn enough PHP to write templates -- and they find it's a
useful skill.
Personally, I'm working on a product that has a complex meta-object
system: it's kind of a CMS for robots, or an object-relational mapper
turned inside out. It layers object-relational and semweb capabilities
over mysql and enables extreme re-use of code and database schemas. It
heavily uses the dynamic dispatch capabilities in PHP, but the core of
it is complicated enough that I wish I had the help of a compiler and
IDE in maintaining it.
If I were a Windows shop, I'd go for ASP.NET. C# is a wonderful
language, a living language. Microsoft is continually improving it,
while it seems Java is stuck in reverse. Linq is just great, and the
C# generics system makes Java generics look like a joke. There's a lot
of junk in ASP.NET, but if you avoid the junk, it's a system that's
better in J2EE in all ways (Java Web Faces is as much of a stinker as
ASP.NET Web Forms) The big trouble is that people from straight-windows
backgrounds can't tell what's junk and what's not -- w/ a decade of PHP
experience (and a healthy phobia of accidentally being stateful) I've
found it easy to find the good stuff in ASP.NET; recent versions of IIS
do a good job of surviving exceptional events inside ASP.NET, better
than most Tomcat installations I've seen.
Of course, ASP.NET means you're stuck with Windows... If you can't
accept that, you've got to use something else.
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