I have done some pretty serious PHP programming in the past. > My personal bias, I have done some programming in PHP and it it appears to be > pretty primitive to me. My perception is that it is something for high school > student because it is easy to run for very simple tasks.
I second that. > However, complex advanced CMS would appear to be difficult and a performance > challenge for PHP, but then there is drupal. People have been doing amazing stuff using PHP. Not just Drupal (about which I know only from hearsay), but also Mediawiki, Joomla, and Wordpress. I blame the old "people have been doing amazing stuff in assembly" effect to that: you can do amazing stuff in pretty much any environment, the difference is that some environments make you spend more time. In the end, all languages are Turing-equivalent, and PHP is marginally reasonable enough that you can build enough of a framework to shield off the worst suckage. > My research has lead me to "java totally sucks" or "php totally sucks" sorts > of comments vs a professional analysis. PHP sucks due to unprofessionalism in the language, and in the standard libraries. Java as a language sucks because it is far too verbose to be fun programming with. Java as an environment suffers from overengineered, overconfigurable libraries - Java library designers try to be compatible with everything and the kitchen sink, which means the configuration has lots of plumbing that you can get wrong. Sometimes I feel I'd get the damn code written faster if I just did it myself and avoided having to learn to use and configure all those libraries. > Finally, I am not aware of any ORM libraries for PHP that would even come > close to Cayenne. PHP as a community only recently managed to implement a useful framework for prepared statement (PDO). I'm surprised something like Propel already exists, even more that it seems to be gaining traction already. > Here's a nice article on the subject > http://onepixelahead.com/2010/03/04/php-vs-java-which-one-is-the-better-web-language/ I wouldn't place too much weight on that article; assuming that PHP is supporting OO just effectively as Java does not sound very solid to me. Regards, Jo
