Doug Ross @ Journal

Why PHP and not JSP?

I found a couple of interesting articles on PHP development that I thought I'd pass on. The first, from Robert Peake's blog, relates to the justification (to the typical, corporate PHBs) a move to PHP from JSP.

An associate of mine recently asked for some metrics to help him back up their decision to move away from JSP and toward PHP. In a recent post, I looked at the fact that many major corporations are using PHP, yet we rarely hear about it. To help address some of the concerns about deploying PHP in the enterprise, this month's article in International PHP Magazine will focus on, "Enterprise PHP Coding Standards" you can enforce in your organization to ensure high-quality code...

Robert Peake: Why PHP and not JSP?

The second article comes from the consistently entertaining PHP Everywhere blog, authored by John Lim. In this post, John addresses Ian Bicking's assertion that Python "could have been" PHP. In other words, it could have been the industry's juggernaut success story... instead of PHP. John critiques that assessment (and rightfully so):

I have used Python since 1997, even before I knew PHP. I smile when Ian says that PHP 5 is barely catching up with the 1995 version of Python. That's irrelevant because what made PHP successful is not what PHP is lacking but the features that PHP has that are superior to Python. Also people continue to confuse simplicity with deficiency. Here are some of the areas where Python remains inferior, despite a 5-year headstart over PHP: * Python is not a template language, in the sense that you cannot mix code and html easily. PHP is a wonderfully flexible in this respect. * Python is a so-so string processing language. One reason being it treats strings as immutable. PHP has much better string processing facilities: embedded "$var in strings", mutable strings, auto-conversion of other data types to strings, output buffering, etc. * PHP's documentation is cleaner and much easier to understand than Python's. Probably because PHP is a simpler language. * PHP has tighter integration of a lot of web related stuff. For example, HTTP and SERVER variables...

John Lim: Python never had a chance against PHP