Re: PHP pros and cons

Chris Shiflett wrote:

--- Steve Douville <php@douville.net> wrote:

I do like CF's ability to just name data sources on the server and reference them that way.

You won't be able to reproduce the "cfadmin" stuff with PHP, simply because PHP isn't a persistent process, but I think great strides will be made on the database front with this: http://pecl.php.net/package/PDO One of ColdFusion's strengths has always been uniforum database access within the code without the extra cost of a userland database abstraction layer. PDO should give PHP developers that same mix of consistency and performance.

PDO has a long way to go to catch up with ADOdb, and I think that demonstrates one of the strengths of PHP. There is a large developer base working on solutions to their own problems, but making the results freely available to everybody. I did a couple of papers at the Firebird Conference last month, one of which was on PHP. While researching it I found a set of useful figures on the http://www.securityspace.com/sspace/index.html site Todays figures http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/200405/index.html Apache has 70% of the world market http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/man.200405/apachemods.html PHP is installed on 52% of those machines ( and that does not include the IIS machines its running on ! ) I'd already standardised on PHP5, but those figures gave me a warm feeling when I confirmed them. Add Firebird and you have a package of Webserver, Scripting and Database that is totally free and runs of Linux or Windows - which ever your customer insists on. Objections - It's not compiled. This is both a good and bad thing. The advantage is that minor changes in a page can be made almost on the fly without having to rebuild the whole application. IF speed becomes a problem then one of the caching packages can be added, and if that is not good enough, then you can easily load share, by running two or more machines. One or more running Apache/PHP, and a second (or more ) running the database. PHP5 is not released yet, but personally I've had no problems with the prerelease stuff in the last few months and no failures on the demo machine at all in that time. Try ibWebAdmin.lsces.co.uk to see what can be done. -- Lester Caine ----------------------------- L.S.Caine Electronic Services