Re: Function caching...

At 20:52 9/12/2000, Björn Schotte wrote:

1-4.): is it only marketing blabla?

Well, mission statements are always controlled by marketing :) So you agree that you fool on people?

I really don't like your tone, and don't like where this conversation is going. To answer in a simple one word answer, 'no'. If you wish to discuss this further, please mail me privately. php-dev@ is hardly the forum for such a discussion.

1. There's no such thing as a 'real application server', because there's no definition for an application server (don't bother coming up with a definition, since there I can come up with 20 others which are just as good). That's right. For a first step of a definition or, let it say in another way: the needs, please read Kristians Mail again.

I'm well aware of what he's written today and in the past.

was talking about in his lengthy letters. It's not designed to do this, it's designed to do something else, and it's doing that other thing very Read again: | [...] with the goals of increasing their productivity and | performance, as well as the competitive advantage of | their sites.

Well, he must be a good marketing guy, since the kind of changes he's talking about hardly improve productivity, unless you're talking about the productivity of your CPUs. When I'm talking about ease of use and productivity, I refer to programmers and developers.

if PHP wasn't designed to do something else, why is your company writing this (and other things) on http://www.zend.com/zend/mission.php ?

If PHP was designed to do all that from scratch, there would be no need for Zend Tech. PHP does its job quite nicely for many, if not most people. Zend Tech does want to take it a step further, by providing separate components, that will allow the vast majority of people to go on using PHP the way they did until now on one hand, but allow large high-end enterprises to deploy it in other environments as well.

No. Opening your mind for new features (read Kristians mail again) doesn't imply that you will loose the ease of use of PHP. Only if the developer wants to use those features we mentioned, he has to use PHP in a not-so-easy way. This isn't bad.

I've read Krisitian's letter, and that's not what he's saying. He's saying that the limitations of PHP are a result of design flaws, which is where we begin to disagree. I consider PHP as a whole to be a very good design and a fairly good implementation for solving the Web-development problem. Sure, it's not everything for everyone, and there's room for improvements, both in the way of improvements to PHP itself, or in the way of external, complementing components.

PHP/Zend is not a commercial product. To go beyond that - there isn't even a product by that name. But Zend Technologies sees itself as the leader of the PHP development and the PHP community.

No it doesn't. It does try to lead the development of new components to PHP, and it does lead the development of the language core as it's the primary developer of the scripting engine. It's by no way the leader of the PHP community, and it shouldn't be either. That would mean PHP became too commercialized.

Please ask your CEO Doron Gerstel: on the PHP conference he pretended that Zend Technologies "is great, a leader in the community, a leader for web applications, [bla bla bla]".

It's *a* leader, not a the leader. There are many others. I'm not sure why you pay so much attention to such stuff, instead of paying attention to the important thing, which is what Zend Tech, or the PHP community *does*. Bla-blaing is meaningless.

I am the maintainer of the largest PHP portal site for the german speaking community which seems to be one of the biggest communities of the world. I organized the PHP conference. I know a _lot_ of people in various (big) companies. I _know_ their needs. I know what they _miss_ on PHP while they are fascinated because PHP is so easy to use.

I'm one of the main designers for the most successful and widely used opensource Web development environment. So what? If you want to compare the color of our feathers, we won't get very far.

Which numbers? That PHP is installed more than 4 million times? You know that quantity doesn't count but quality? Did you ever consider that it could be that PHP is only used for 08/15 applications while with really _interesting_, _not boring_ and _complex_ PHP applications you have to do a lot of workarounds/hacks? Did you ever consider that stagnation is NOT a good way to improve quality and to gain the place on the market?

Well, knowing what I *know*, I know that it's not the case, so I sleep very well at night. Just because you raise arbitrary doubts, doesn't mean they have any truth to them. In particular, the doubts you raise have some truth to them, but they're far from being as grave and problematic as you portray them.

We don't want to kill the user base we now have, but we want that PHP fills the needs of TODAY, NOT of the PAST.

It won't happen TODAY. The sooner you realize this, the better. It won't happen in the context of PHP itself, in my opinion, and the sooner you realize that, the better as well. Does it mean it won't happen at all? Not really. Does it mean that when it does happen, it'll happen exactly the way Kristian wants it to? Probably not, unless he sits down and writes it himself. It doesn't mean that the solutions would be bad.

Well, you have to go back Evolution. Not Past. Not stagnation.

What Kristian talks about in the past months is *revolution*, not evolution. If you say 'not past' right after you say 'evolution', then apparently, you don't know the definition for evolution. Zeev -- Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> CTO, Zend Technologies Ltd. http://www.zend.com/