Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has come a long way. My last job was at a big PHP shop, which had a heavy focus on doing PHP The Right Way. The result was a fairly decent, maintainable codebase. I came to really appreciate the flexibility and ability to just "make things work" that PHP has, while finally having a proper development environment with real dependency management and IDE support.
Do you have any pointers to the recommended Right Way to do modern PHP? I'd be interested to explore it; I have a number of places where I want to add tiny bits of interactivity to otherwise static web pages, and this totally seems to be what PHP does best.
PHP 7 Virtual Machine
71–80 of 128 posts
Re: PHP 7 Virtual Machine
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has come a long way. My last job was at a big PHP shop, which had a heavy focus on doing PHP The Right Way. The result was a fairly decent, maintainable codebase. I came to really appreciate the flexibility and ability to just "make things work" that PHP has, while finally having a proper development environment with real dependency management and IDE support.
Do you have any pointers to the recommended Right Way to do modern PHP? I'd be interested to explore it; I have a number of places where I want to add tiny bits of interactivity to otherwise static web pages, and this totally seems to be what PHP does best.
http://phptherightway.com is a good place to start, if you haven't read it before. It's opinionated, and not necessarily a guide follow down to the letter, but it can put you on the right track.
Re: PHP 7 Virtual Machine
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use PHP quite a bit outside of the web. I think tpetry was pointing out the difference between a language and a framework built on that language. (Replace language with whatever you think it is, it's still a subset just like Ruby on Rails is a subset of Ruby)
And I'm pointing out that treating PHP as a framework is not a "flaw in argumentation". The default installation of PHP gives you a setup that parses HTTP requests and returns HTTP responses, and provides a bunch of web-centric functionality in between. ie. it's a web framework, albeit not a very good one.
> The default installation of PHP gives you a setup that parses HTTP requests and returns HTTP responses
Correct me if I am wrong, but so does Node, Ruby, Python, etc...
Sure it was built for the web, in simpler times, but everything has to start somewhere. Now days, PHP is a completely different beast.
> Just not a very good one.
An opinion if fine, but it seems like you are deriving this opinion from old experiences (or maybe the old PHP hate bandwagon)
Re: PHP 7 Virtual Machine
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps you can send me down the righ path? I want my users to be able to send emails from their iPads, and those emails would be generated based on templates. There will be many such templates built in, and eventually users will be able to hire web developer-type person to make custom templates. My thinking was that PHP is the most popular language for that sort of thing, so it would be nice if could support that. M…
PHP is not a templating language. You can build a template engine with it, but then, you can build one with any other language. If your app is in swift or objective-c, look into template libraries for those languages. Simple Google search tells me there's a couple of options including one using handlebar's format.
How is this not a template? It generates valId HTML out of data.
";
} Re: PHP 7 Virtual Machine
#75It's always pleasant to see PHP occasionally get a positive moment in the limelight on HN. It's oft scorned yet powers a very large chunk of the web. With the work done on 7 it's also one of the fastest scripting languages around and deserves a little more credit if I'm honest.
Honestly. I think its main problem is it's not hipster enough. It's too popular. I bet if you made it difficult to use (for most people), added features that make certain aspects a nightmare to scale and gave it a weird name then it would do well here. Obviously don't let anyone know about the origin... say you built it at a series of obscure coding bootcamps.
I think that's unfair, the reason PHP has a bad reputation is not because of silly hipsters. It's because for a long time it was a terribly designed language. It was a laughing stock for a good reason. The whole "hobby-grade templating language turned general purpose with complete disregard to how programing languages are designed" thing.
Now I'm willing to believe that it's improved a lot since then, but it's got a very bad reputation to overcome, and it's deserved. The languages seems headed in the right direction at least, maybe in a few years we'll forget what PHP used to be.
Re: PHP 7 Virtual Machine
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I'm pointing out that treating PHP as a framework is not a "flaw in argumentation". The default installation of PHP gives you a setup that parses HTTP requests and returns HTTP responses, and provides a bunch of web-centric functionality in between. ie. it's a web framework, albeit not a very good one.
> The default installation of PHP gives you a setup that parses HTTP requests and returns HTTP responses Correct me if I am wrong, but so does Node, Ruby, Python, etc... Sure it was built for the web, in simpler times, but everything has to start somewhere. Now days, PHP is a completely different beast. > Just not a very good one. An opinion if fine, but it seems like you are deriving this opinion from old experience…
> Correct me if I am wrong, but so does Node, Ruby, Python, etc.
I think Node is also a framework, although there seems to be some controversy about this[1]. Ruby and Python give you standard libraries from which you can build a web server or templating engine or whatever, but it would be weird to say that made them Web Frameworks. Maybe things have changed, but last I knew PHP had a command line switch that tells it to not act like a web framework, because that is its default mode of operation. But you're right that it's been a few years.
I don't think I'm jumping on a hate bandwagon, but I am succumbing to someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet syndrome, which I know to be a mistake.
Although I can't resist asking - are you saying PHP is a good web framework? How does that fit with the idea that PHP is not a web framework?
[1] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2991...
Re: PHP 7 Virtual Machine
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
PHP is a web framework. It's just one that requires another framework on top to mitigate its shortcomings.
I use PHP quite a bit outside of the web. I think tpetry was pointing out the difference between a language and a framework built on that language. (Replace language with whatever you think it is, it's still a subset just like Ruby on Rails is a subset of Ruby)
Sure you could separate PHP the language from PHP the processing instruction and PHP the standard lib. But PHP calls itself a "hypertext preprocessor" (it's in the name) and PHP's own intro (literally on page 1, sentence 1, cf. [1]) advertises web templating as its distinguishing feature. So I think it's fair to compare PHP against other HTML generators.
Re: PHP 7 Virtual Machine
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing I like about PHP for quick prototyping or one-off projects is that an error doesn't bring the whole server down. For instance, I held a workshop where I hosted a server the students were to do some requests to. I had written a simple Node application that read the json they sent and returned a result. What I didn't anticipate was that them sending malformed json would bring the whole server down. So then I…
Every web framework out there (express + nodejs included) will handle exceptions properly and not blow up the server on exception.
Express can't catch an exception thrown in a callback cleanly.
Re: PHP 7 Virtual Machine
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course you can write safe code in PHP, it is a complete general purpose programming language. But just like one can blame C's design and standard library for many security bugs I also think it is fair to blame PHP's standard library and design. For example PHP's PDO library makes it less convenient to supply parameters to a query the safe way than it is to do it the unsafe way. This is not necessary as can be seen…
I would say it's unfair to compare a library to the basic PDO. If you want to compare apples to apples, try looking at Sequel versus Doctrine or some other third party SQL library. Just like any other template language (thinking of something like ColdFusion or ASP), of course one unescaped variable is going to be a headache. But you don't have to use it that way, and probably shouldn't. While PHP started as a templat…
I do not think it is an unfair comparison since Sequel has both basic parts on the same level as PDO, and then implements the more advanced features on top of these basic parts. The basic parts of Sequel has superior usability and safety to PDO.
Sequel's right way:
user = db['SELECT name FROM users WHERE id = ?', id].first
user = db["SELECT name FROM users WHERE id = #{id}"].first
$stmt = $db->prepare('SELECT name FROM users WHERE id = ?');
$stmt->execute([$id]);
$user = $stmt->fecth();
$user = $db->query("SELECT name FROM users WHERE id = $id")->fetch();
> Just like any other template language (thinking of something like ColdFusion or ASP), of course one unescaped variable is going to be a headache.
That is simply not true. Look at Twig which by default escapes everything automatically, or Rails's patched ERB which keeps track of escaped an unescaped strings based on data types and makes sure everything is automatically escaped in the end. In those template languages you need the explicitly do something unsafe to get an unescaped value. While in PHP you need to audit all places where echo can be called directly or indirectly.
Re: PHP 7 Virtual Machine
#80It's always pleasant to see PHP occasionally get a positive moment in the limelight on HN. It's oft scorned yet powers a very large chunk of the web. With the work done on 7 it's also one of the fastest scripting languages around and deserves a little more credit if I'm honest.
Honestly. I think its main problem is it's not hipster enough. It's too popular. I bet if you made it difficult to use (for most people), added features that make certain aspects a nightmare to scale and gave it a weird name then it would do well here. Obviously don't let anyone know about the origin... say you built it at a series of obscure coding bootcamps.
> I bet if you made it difficult to use (for most people), added features that make certain aspects a nightmare to scale and gave it a weird name then it would do well here
This is the same quality of vapid criticism that is often levied against PHP, just in reverse, all that's missing is a link to a 'fractal of bad design' type of post. I'm guessing you're going to try and justify your comment with some version of "well my criticisms are actually valid", but hopefully I'm wrong.