Joe,
Thanks for the lecture but again, where are your references? <sarcasm> A Wired magazine article about how PHP sucks? Something from Gartner predicting the demise of PHP? Maybe a Computerworld review of a "Point-Counterpoint" discussion featuring a bruised and bloodied Rasmus Lerdorf with the foot of Dr. Gosling standing over him triumphantly? </sarcasm> It's your statement. All I am asking is that you support it with a couple of references that are hopefully less than 2 years old and reasonably credible.
A couple of points.
Your right, though, I am selling PHP. Well, sort of right. Actually, I advocate PHP. PHP is a TRUE open source language and therefore free. Built for the web by the community, for the community. And while that community is not perfect they do admit when they make a mistake and fix them quickly. The same applies to Zend Framework. I see a lot of benefit in a technology that does not rely on a single egalitarian empire for its revisions. I work for a company that profits from selling tools and servers for PHP. (They also contribute to the code base and bug fixes.) Not unlike what IBM has been doing for years with WDSC/Rational and WebsFear. That must make us nearly as evil as the "big blue" devil.
If there were a battle in the PHP community I would expect a "fork" in the project. Some other technologies that come to mind are MySQL where it got forked into Maria, etc. by a bunch of the developers who left MySQL/Oracle(
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2450534/which-mysql-fork-version-to-pick ,
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/14/widenius_aker_versus_oracle_owned_myswl/ ) because of the alleged FUD. Could this spell the foreboding of Java under similar rule? I hope not. Isn't One Java enough, after all? The nice thing about an open source community is that it is a lot like water and seeks its own level. If the community, or sections of that community, are not happy with PHP they would fork it into "PHP/Watusi" or something just as catchy. Another key factor is that the community is also forgiving. If you want to offer a contribution that would make more sense to you like multiple inheritance in PHP, and you have the wherewithal to write it-test it-document it, the community would probably accept it.
Dude, I may say that Java was difficult for me to learn. But I would never disparage it (except for comic relief). In fact, Zend Server CE supports the JavaBridge which is based upon an open source project and is designed for recovering Java Developers trying to work through their 12 steps in the world of PHP. I firmly believe that organizations should choose the technology that makes sense for them and embrace it, 100%. Too many companies give it a half hearted effort and the language takes it on the chin. That goes for PHP, Java, .Net, etc... I don't disparage .Net, either. Just ask Richard. ;-)
Regards,
Mike
mike.p@xxxxxxxx Cell: (408)679-1011 Office: (630)928-1476
Zend Server for IBM i avilable at
http://www.zend.com/en/products/server/zend-server-5-new-ibmi
-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Joe Pluta
Sent: Monday, December 13, 2010 4:31 PM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] The ASF Resigns From the JCP Executive Committee
On 12/13/2010 8:22 AM, Mike Pavlak wrote:
I am not familiar with the "battle" either. Joe, can you site some references from which you are referring?
You should be familiar with this stuff, Mike, since you're selling it,
but evidently not so I'll update you.
PHP4 and PHP5 are "compatible" except where they aren't. In fact, a
couple of significant underlying pieces got completely changed. Two big
ones are objects, which in PHP4 were passed by value but in PHP5 are
passed by reference. Another problem which is minor but just painful as
hell is the fact that the classnames in PHP5 are now case sensitive,
whereas in PHP4 everything was always converted to lowercase.
There are other similar issues, enough so that lots of PHP4 code didn't
run under PHP5. Enough problems existed that for years after the
release, people were still recommending PHP4 over PHP5, and a majority
of hosting sites were still on PHP4. Years, you say? Well, yeah. PHP5
is now nearly 7 years old. And out there on the Intertubes, lots of the
example code for PHP is still PHP4, even though PHP4 was officially
discontinued as of the end of 2007.
What's up with PHP6? Well, the move to Unicode didn't go too
swimmingly. In fact, it gummed up the works enough that the PHP6 trunk
was abandoned. So PHP6 is on indefinite hold while PHP5 continues and
the PHP folks decide to come up with a new Unicode strategy. The point
is that I'll be interested to see given the slow uptake of PHP5 how many
years it takes PHP5 sites to get up to PHP6.
But really, don't take my word for it. Read up on the stuff. Read
about PHP6.
My original comment was that if Oracle decides to force a fork on Java,
they will turn it into PHP, in which backwards compatibility is not a
given (take a look at magic quotes or register globals). The loss of
stability may not be as important to a language you use primarily for
scripting, but it's a crucial issue with a true enterprise language like
Java.
Joe
midrange.com
