note 3449 deleted from What can PHP do? by ronabop

brian@apam.com posted a message on 28-DEC-1999 concerning PHP's equivalence to ASP's Server.CreateObject method. I'm not a PHP programmer yet and would like to become one if someone can tell me why I should need that functionality in PHP. Here's the reason: PHP and ASP are just server-side scripting languages. You'd have to have a complete middle-tier infrastructure in place so that the server-side script can program upon. In ASP, CreateObject is useful only if COM+ or the alike is in place. In UNIX world, the best thing next to COM+ (on Win 2K) is CORBA or EJB. If a PHP programmer doesn't know either, then PHP itself cannot help. If CORBA/EJB is in place, then the chances are, these programs must have been wrritten in languages other than PHP. Having CreateObject or similar implemented in PHP hence is less atractive. It's like writting ASP pages without the middle-tier support. Good for school level practice, but definitely not for enterprise transactions. Why should I be interested in PHP? I'm not allowed to have convenience access to an IIS server so I have to resolve my Web site in Solaris. I'd use PHP without a transaction oriented middle-tier. I'm not programming for enterprise scale Web applications so I know I can get away with it, for a while. Now I need someone to stand up and tell me I'm wrong.