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PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

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Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#91

Post by innocenat »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #76
Seattle3503 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m still not certain even today, if anything exists that is faster to get a dynamic site up and running than PHP. With PHP you can just start typing in your file and produce output. Even with lightweight frameworks like Flask there is boilerplate.

This ignores the monstrous complexity of setting up PHP (and php-fpm) on a host machine. I prefer fully contained targeted binaries these days.

`apt install apache2 php libapache2-mod-php` will perfectly set up Apache with PHP all Debian-based distros. What's complex about that?

And if you really need php-fpm (which you should, anyway), at least in Ubuntu (never set up on other distro), the boilerplate nginx config is there.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#92

Post by simon1ltd »

29athrowaway wrote: post #86
owenversteeg wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just the early 2000s - up until maybe 2010 or so (probably a bit later) PHP was the clear leader for anyone who wanted to get something done. There was Rails and ASP.net and Java (I don’t remember anything else that was super popular) but PHP was a million times faster to develop in. Anything you wanted was explained in depth in the first Google result. You want auth? A chat server? File management? You could get…

If you need to cook an egg, you can serve 1 request per second with PHP and use your CPU as heat source.

Only if your code is poorly written.

Even on basic hardware, hundreds of requests per second are trivial -- assuming you aren't loading a bunch of files ("require") or making 800 trips to the database to load the site.

I've never found PHPs performance to be a limiting factor, even when I was dealing with dynamic page loads coming in at sustained rates between 50 and 100 per second, and this was on PHP4/5, slow (400MHZ), single core, low ram system. FAMP stack.

I assume Java apps are the same way -- I've never encountered (to my knowledge) a java-based website that wasn't slow. I assume anything that relies on a huge framework probably also had that framework to blame for most performance problems.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#93

Post by progforlyfe »

29athrowaway wrote: post #86
owenversteeg wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just the early 2000s - up until maybe 2010 or so (probably a bit later) PHP was the clear leader for anyone who wanted to get something done. There was Rails and ASP.net and Java (I don’t remember anything else that was super popular) but PHP was a million times faster to develop in. Anything you wanted was explained in depth in the first Google result. You want auth? A chat server? File management? You could get…

If you need to cook an egg, you can serve 1 request per second with PHP and use your CPU as heat source.

I prefer python or ruby, they cook the egg faster

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#94

Post by simon1ltd »

kbenson wrote: post #28
alberth wrote: post #11

It’s hard to explain just how much easier PHP made creating a dynamic web site back in the 90s / early 00s. You drop a file in your public web server folder and you’re done. Prior was CGI Perl scripts that hacked together how to access session and rest data. Or you had to develop in C. PHP had native support for the web. It also eliminate the need for an app server. I’m still not certain even today, if anything exist…

> You drop a file in your public web server folder and you’re done. The implications of what this meant for security were very important too, but in a negative way. Instead of an application with a single or few small entry points (like CGI), you could just design your PHP app with a bunch of files spread across the exposed public directory structure, and for a long time this was the reigning paradigm for PHP. This,…

I'm not convinced that security is actually that much higher. I agree with your examples, but the complexity of most environments now is such that you almost have to know what you're doing in order to attempt to stay secure.

How often do people leak things via S3 because they couldn't set the permissions properly? Same thing as you mention, except it's yet another layer that has to be maintained.

I went from Perl to PHP, and my productivity definitely improved, and the speed of execution also improved significantly. mod_perl was available, but I was pretty well switched to PHP by the time I really looked into that.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#95

Post by simon1ltd »

aeontech wrote: post #83
geitir wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It def started mine. The biggest for me was the excellent documentation and comments as you said. The comments were like an early version of stackoverflow

Yes! I don't think people who started in the modern age can even relate to how amazing this was, to have a documentation site with a built-in user comment system collecting errata, tips, pointers and snippets (even as erroneous as they sometimes were)... This was before the embarrassment of riches that we have now... - before proliferation of open source examples on GitHub, - before StackOverflow, - before jsfiddles,…

The search engines weren't great -- I think I had the best luck with Altavista. It's almost impossible to convey how different the 'web was back then. Searching mailing list or usenet archives was the only way to track down examples most of the time.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#96

Post by robjan »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #76
Seattle3503 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m still not certain even today, if anything exists that is faster to get a dynamic site up and running than PHP. With PHP you can just start typing in your file and produce output. Even with lightweight frameworks like Flask there is boilerplate.

This ignores the monstrous complexity of setting up PHP (and php-fpm) on a host machine. I prefer fully contained targeted binaries these days.

If you're on Windows you can just install XAMPP and it "just works".

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#97

Post by progforlyfe »

cutler wrote: post #64
nkozyra wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting decent performance and/or scaling was/is a major challenge. The rest of what you say I agree with, but the language was never a performance bottleneck over other scripting languages. It certainly scaled better than ruby or perl or python apps with the same logic. The fact that each request was fundamentally stateless and ephemeral helped this if you needed to distribute your app and made development faster…

Paradoxically, PHP's stateless architecture is also what makes it dog-slow with large frameworks such as Laravel. Now you have to load the whole framework with every request.

> the whole framework

Files are autoloaded lazily, meaning only classes that are touched are loaded on any given request. If the code is split into well sized, purposeful modules, it becomes a non issue.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#98

Post by mekster »

alberth wrote: post #11

It’s hard to explain just how much easier PHP made creating a dynamic web site back in the 90s / early 00s. You drop a file in your public web server folder and you’re done. Prior was CGI Perl scripts that hacked together how to access session and rest data. Or you had to develop in C. PHP had native support for the web. It also eliminate the need for an app server. I’m still not certain even today, if anything exist…

Perl wasn't bad, in fact I like it's Unixism in it but too bad it lost momentum. Every language has more than one way to do it, so it wasn't a down side, it's just programmers needed to know what they're doing like always.

mod_perl worked without running an app server but I still don't know how other languages never implement mod_$lang or $lang-fpm that reloads code on change, so you don't have to place auto restart magic on development.

These days you need transpilers (but I don't blame the flourishing of higher level tools when JS, CSS kind of totally stalled from adding useful features and people never let go of old browsers), auto restart of app servers and other build procedures just to get started and that's one of the reason people stick to plain PHP/CSS/JS (loaded independently via script tag...).

We do want nice pretty slick GUI that does all that for cross platform to get new people started without asking them to do console magics. I know a few good ones but doesn't seem cross platform.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#100

Post by kyriakos »

29athrowaway wrote: post #86
owenversteeg wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just the early 2000s - up until maybe 2010 or so (probably a bit later) PHP was the clear leader for anyone who wanted to get something done. There was Rails and ASP.net and Java (I don’t remember anything else that was super popular) but PHP was a million times faster to develop in. Anything you wanted was explained in depth in the first Google result. You want auth? A chat server? File management? You could get…

If you need to cook an egg, you can serve 1 request per second with PHP and use your CPU as heat source.

Performance is the last thing one can blame php for. Its quite fast for a non compiled dynamic language and most bottlenecks are usually I/O and db access
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