Re: Separate buisness and display logic question

On 2/4/2011 10:43 AM, Bryce Martin wrote:

Joe,
I appreciate your work and analysis of Java vs. PHP. And I agree, that
they both have their caveates but are largly equal to each other,
syntatically. But you can say that about any C based language.

Which makes my point: one is not easier to learn than another. It's one of the big arguments in the IBM i community: PHP is so much easier to learn than Java. I disagree. Except for the typing, the languages are almost identical, it's just that Java was written that way from the ground up, and obviously very well since PHP copied the syntax. Sincerest form of flattery and all that. :)

Deployment, which you touch on below, is a little different.

The use of Java and PHP boils down to far more than syntax. PHP is a
scripting language where as Java is a compiled language that has to be run
in a virtual machine. This make Java (at least in my opinion) slightly
more complicated to maintain and deploy.

Interesting. What do you see as the difference between an interpreter and a virtual machine? I realize they're different, but philosophically they're similar. I suppose the difference is that an interpreter magically picks up the newest version, right? That seems to be your primary point, especially in the next paragraph...

If I want to deploy a change for
PHP I just have to plop the new script in place, but if I want to deploy
new Java code I have to restart the web server (at least in the case of
WAS and JSP's... I'm guessing this holds true with other app servers as
well for Java).

And this aimply isn't true. If you deploy a new version of a JSP to a web server, it is automatically picked up, recompiled and ready to run. Not only that, but the compiled bytecodes then get further compiled by the JIT compiler to machine instructions. That makes JSP execution lightning fast, which seems to be your other point...

Also, I know that Java has made great strides in recent years when it
comes to execution speed. But that hasn't always been the case.

It's been the case since the JIT compiler. I can build Java applications that easily provide ten pages per second performance. That's more than fast enough for any application I need. You?

PHP was strictly built for the web.

Sort of. PHP was written as an extension of Perl. It was to generate HTML, not write web applications. Bit of a difference.

Java is adapted for the web.

True, to a point. Unlike PHP, Java was built from the ground up for OO programming. This givesd it the ability to do just about anything that requires programmatic encapsulation of strict rules - for example, formatting HTML. But Java is more than just "adapted" for the web; the entire Java EE framework is about nothing BUT web application development - a framework that far surpasses anything in the PHP world. But I digress <grin>.

Both are valid options.

Yep. So is the LDA. Which is closer to the LDA, do you think? PHP or Java?

But when it comes to code, there are far more PHP sites out
there than Java.

Yep. Sure are. A lot more .NET than RPG. A lot more Windows boxes than IBM i machines. There's no accounting for taste. ;)

Joe