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Ask HN: Is PHP/MySQL Still Practical for Building Web Applications?

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Re: Ask HN: Is PHP/MySQL Still Practical for Building Web Applications?

#51

Post by vital101 »

dangrossman wrote: post #19

You can just as easily say RoR is slower (than, say, Symfony 2.0 on PHP with an opcode cache) and harder to work with (from a system administration perspective). Take a look down the top 100 website list, and of those sites that are web applications, more of them will be built on PHP than not. I don't think there's even a Ruby application among the top 100 sites except parts of Twitter, but I could be forgetting some…

It's extremely important to draw a distinction between cool and practical. HN is all about the cool new hotness. People here are always on the bleeding edge of technology, so they tend to flock towards those instead.

Also, hiring PHP developers is easier than developers. There are just more people with PHP knowledge. Not saying that is a good reason to use a language, but it is a factor.

Re: Ask HN: Is PHP/MySQL Still Practical for Building Web Applications?

#52

Post by sanswork »

rimantas wrote: post #41
dangrossman wrote: post #19

You can just as easily say RoR is slower (than, say, Symfony 2.0 on PHP with an opcode cache) and harder to work with (from a system administration perspective). Take a look down the top 100 website list, and of those sites that are web applications, more of them will be built on PHP than not. I don't think there's even a Ruby application among the top 100 sites except parts of Twitter, but I could be forgetting some…

You can just as easily say RoR is slower (than, say, Symfony 2.0 on PHP with an opcode cache) You can say that, but is it true? I did not investigate it, but the last time I saw some comparison PHP frameworks were horribly slow compared to RoR.

I use RoR for all our control panels and human interfaces at work. RoR is many things but fast isn't something I would call it.

Re: Ask HN: Is PHP/MySQL Still Practical for Building Web Applications?

#54

Post by jentulman »

Yes it's very practical.

Finding a hosting solution for PHP is not going to be to difficult.

It's not going to 'go away' anytime soon, certainly not before it becomes time to re-write your codebase.

The docs are good.

Whether or not there is something which does any of those points better does not change the answer to the actual question. Yes, PHP/MySQL is still practical for building web apps.

Re: Ask HN: Is PHP/MySQL Still Practical for Building Web Applications?

#55

Post by kemo »

michaelhart wrote: post #49
rimantas wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just as easily say RoR is slower (than, say, Symfony 2.0 on PHP with an opcode cache) You can say that, but is it true? I did not investigate it, but the last time I saw some comparison PHP frameworks were horribly slow compared to RoR.

codeigniter is VERY fast, and it doesn't get in your way. codeigniter is commonly referred to as the Ruby on Rails for php by some.

kohana 3 is more like RoR for PHP, CI is like RoR for PHP4 :)

Re: Ask HN: Is PHP/MySQL Still Practical for Building Web Applications?

#56

Post by pbiggar »

hallmark wrote: post #47
dangrossman wrote: post #19

You can just as easily say RoR is slower (than, say, Symfony 2.0 on PHP with an opcode cache) and harder to work with (from a system administration perspective). Take a look down the top 100 website list, and of those sites that are web applications, more of them will be built on PHP than not. I don't think there's even a Ruby application among the top 100 sites except parts of Twitter, but I could be forgetting some…

YouTube was written in Python. Just wanted to add a unique (and possibly non-obvious) data point.

In a similar vein, Google is largely written in C++.

Re: Ask HN: Is PHP/MySQL Still Practical for Building Web Applications?

#57

Post by rbanffy »

Servers are cheap, programmers are expensive and bugs can kill you.

I suggest going with whatever gives you clean and correct code faster. I wouldn't suggest PHP for a new project. If you already have a big codebase written in PHP, you should keep it, but by "keep" I mean maintaining and cleaning up, not only adding to.

As for MySQL, it's good enough unless you get too successful - then it becomes painful to keep it going. Mostly any RDBMS has this problem. Again, for a new project, I'd go with PostgreSQL, but that's more a matter of taste.

Re: Ask HN: Is PHP/MySQL Still Practical for Building Web Applications?

#59

Post by hardy263 »

oemera wrote: post #46

Lately these questions and discussions are everywhere and most times I think people are missing the point: it's all about code you want to write. We created all those high level languages to make code easy to read, to make them people understand. I mean you could probably write your website in Assembla but the language won't help you to write down what you really want. As a developer you are trying to develop somethi…

Informative: I believe the term you are referring to is Sigil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigil_(computer_programming)

I actually never found having the dollar sign as a sigil was any problem. There are a lot of punctuation symbols used in programming that are not used the same way as they are used in English grammar. In English, you don't create a new paragraph for every line indented in, the ^ sign is not often used for exclusive or, % is not used for modulus, and * is not used for multiplication.

You could also probably make a length function which returns strlen($str) if you really wanted to have $str->length.

Re: Ask HN: Is PHP/MySQL Still Practical for Building Web Applications?

#60

Post by ErrantX »

kemo wrote: post #55
michaelhart wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

codeigniter is VERY fast, and it doesn't get in your way. codeigniter is commonly referred to as the Ruby on Rails for php by some.

kohana 3 is more like RoR for PHP, CI is like RoR for PHP4 :)

Seconded, Kohana really wipes the floor with CI nowadays (this from someone still forced to maintain a couple of CI-based sites...) :P
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