Re: Scalability and large site issues

> If an application grows in asp then you write a COM object and port the code > to the COM object (which is compiled and therefore more efficient) to do the > work. > In JSP you would use EJB to build the server side components. > > The above two sets of technologies appear to be tightly integrated into each > other. More accurately, those are required to do anything useful. You cannot build anything non-trivial in ASP without using COM; JSP is essentially Java in a different format, so it's assumed that you'll be using things like JavaBeans in their various forms. The difference with PHP is that you can do most of what you need using the base language. As far as expansion goes, you have quite a few choices - COM, Java, custom extensions, relying on the advanced programming facilities of something like Oracle (e.g. call an Oracle store procedure, which IIRC can be Java these days), building your own interface using SysV semaphore & shared memory support to minimize overhead, or even doing something like having your PHP scripts pass requests (in XML?) to a separate server & formatting the responses. I would question, however, whether it's a good idea to build too much complicated logic into a web script. I'd think it would make more sense to have your scripts simply store things in the database so that the very complex processing can be done in the background by a separate program which has been optimized for batch processing instead of serving web pages.