Re: PHP review

Teodor Cimpoesu writes: > What do you guys think of the 'cons' listed at the bottom? The review seems so cursory, and the pros and cons so few, I'll list them all and add a few of my own PROS: * Powerful, open and scalable * A large (and ever-growing) number of extensions * Support for all Web standards * Easy to learn CONS: * Rudimentary session management * Database access is not unified * No database connection pooling The pros, I agree with, though supporting *ALL* web standards is saying a bit too much. DAV is after all, not supported, since the module just plain doesnt work (see the PHP dev list, they're talking about putting in a #error directive in the source to disable it by default) As for the cons. > * Rudimentary session management Seems more to me to be *undocumented* session management. The quality of the manual is uneven, and session management gets very short shrift. Short enough that I reckon it just wasn't important enough to mention, so I don't even use it. If it's a major feature, I sure can't tell. > * Database access is not unified Not only is database access not unified like Perl's DBI/DBD system, there's not a damned thing in PHP that feels "unified". If you open a pipe with popen, you have to use a different method to close it. God forbid you should ever create your own stream class. With everything thrown into a single global namespace of functions, there is no hope whatsoever for standard interfaces for similar functions (serialize and wddx should have been subclasses of the same object, for example). PHP is a complete ad hoc hodgepodge and shows every sign of getting worse in this respect. Modules need to live on objects, objects that define a standard interface, not littering a global namespace of very non-OO functions. Think I'm being fairly clear on this? > * No database connection pooling I thought most of the interfaces supported a "persistent open" function, that seems to implement a pool for me. Even the non-persistent connections are memoized and pool within the same request. Not sure where this con came from, it doesn't appear to be true at all. Anyhow, I have a litany of gripes about PHP, its myopic focus as a "web only" language (imagine what would have happened to a "gopher-only" language?) and so forth. I hope to air some of them eventually, but there's my take on that article. chuck