Re: Re: PHP vs Java reliability

Geoff Caplan wrote:

Michael

the "Why PHP" on zend.com is a great place to go for this sort of

stuff...

Honestly, it doesn't seem all that professional a resource paper...

I would tend to agree - not something you could show to a hard-headed corporate purchasing committee with any confidence.

I believe Java *can* be pretty stable and robust, but at a cost which far exceeds PHP's. This is something that seemed to be missing from that article - a cost/benefit analysis compared to other platforms .....

Yeah, Java/ASP/etc can have enormous benefits over PHP in some situations, but the price tag is often beyond what people initially imagine.

I suspect that this is the vital point - for the right type of project PHP will be quicker to develop and cheaper to deploy. I think the Zend case would be more credible if they defined the niche for PHP more clearly - which is surely the small to mid-sized project. My own project is aimed at making fully customised e-commerce affordable for the smaller organisation, and this seems an ideal field for PHP. For end-to-end enterprise computing, PHP would need better namespaces, a proper object model, more rigorous error handling, a thriving market in high-quality components (and/or a robust interface to Java) and a fully featured IDE. Zend 2 should lay the foundations for this, but by then Java will be so far ahead that PHP may never catch up. But does this matter? The great majority of organisations and projects are small, and for them PHP is ideal. If I were Zend, I would be focusing on products and pricing that appeals to this market, but they rather give the impression that they are aiming for the enterprise... Geoff Caplan I aggree. It comes down to what you are doing.

But I dont think java is needed unless you are doing one damn big e-com site. Php can handle a fair bit. And to use java costs you a hell of a lot more. First thing to work out is if you need to use java. To many places jump in, thinking yeah we need a $50,000 server and $100,000 worth of dev software, when they would of done fine with a $10,000 server and $0 software.