On 19/08/11 2:18 AM, Joe Baldwin wrote:
This question has come up again, and I thought that I would try to research it but this
appears to be another "holy war". I am looking for links to formal (or just
professional) studies done on PHP vs Java - based websites. I am specifically trying to
find out what the real differences are when using an an advanced ORM (like Cayenne) with
memory management and performance optimization, vs well whatever the heck they use for
PHP.
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. However, complex
advanced CMS would appear to be difficult and a performance challenge for PHP,
but then there is drupal.
I've actually done quite a bit of work in Drupal, so I know it fairly well.
They achieve a lot of speed by doing things like caching the entire rendered
page in the database, this reduces the number of SQL calls to deliver a
previously cached page to essentially one. However my personal opinion is that
the speed of the language/environment is irrelevant. So what if one is 50%
faster than the other? Unless you are a Google engineer trying to get that tiny
bit of performance per watt per rack unit, for most of what we ordinary
programmers are trying to do, it is not terribly important. Stick another 24Gb
of RAM into that server and upgrade the CPU with another 4 cores.
Which leaves us with the important (IMO) metrics:
1. ease of finding programmers
2. ease of adding features and code maintenance
3. ease of finding/fixing bugs
For many open source projects, PHP wins because of (1). But it doesn't scale
terribly well to larger projects. (2) Becomes increasingly hard in PHP as the
project gets large. PHP makes it hard to write clean MVC style projects, use
modern techniques like injection or write unit tests. You can do these things,
but you'll be fighting the framework. If you want a nice interpreted language
and framework which makes those things much easier, take a look at Ruby/Rails.
It has MVC and unit tests right at its core essence of being. And the ORM is
not bad. Not as nice as Cayenne :-) but still not bad. When it doesn't have
bugs. Rails does suffer from being a bit unstable and moving rather too fast
with new features before they are ready. The ORM syntax is quite neat. For
example:
Task.joins(:owners).where(:users => {:id => current_user}).order("tasks.weight
DESC").limit(1).first
Andrus has discussed a similar query syntax for Cayenne in the past.
If your project can be built on top of Drupal (or another PHP Based CMS), then
you have a lot to gain by just extending the existing code with your own
modules. I've done that quite a few times and it works well for simpler
projects (that is, where you are adding maybe 5-6 tables to the existing Drupal
schema).
PHP and Rails projects often make use of memcache when they start to hit
performance walls, so you always have solutions to hardware scalability. But
again, I believe you are focussing on the wrong problem. Skilled staff and
development effort, not hardware, is the real limitation.
Cheers
Ari
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Aristedes Maniatis
GPG fingerprint CBFB 84B4 738D 4E87 5E5C 5EFA EF6A 7D2E 3E49 102A
