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PHP: the quiet powerhouse

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Re: PHP: the quiet powerhouse

#31

Post by Joeri »

gnaritas wrote: post #24
techiferous wrote: post #23

If you are just starting out as a web developer and aren't planning on changing careers anytime soon, the #1 language you should learn is JavaScript. It, or languages that compile to it, will still be in fashion in 5 or even 10 years. That's because the web is shifting to thick clients, and JavaScript is the only choice in browsers. JavaScript is also finding its way into server-side code (Node.js). "I think PHP is t…

> Server-side view rendering is on its way out. So this is not a real advantage. No it isn't, client side view rendering is just experiencing a faddish phase; it'll fade. It'll never overtake server side rendering on the web.

The realities of roundtrip time won't go away. Serverside rendering will always delivers worse responsiveness. Blame physics.

Re: PHP: the quiet powerhouse

#32

Post by skymt »

lucperkins wrote: post #18
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just mad about the title. The post was about how PHP is quick and dirty for simple stuff. The reason all of the other web frameworks exist is because once you get past the learning curve, you can accomplish a lot in a very short span of time. If anything, they are the powerhouses, not PHP.

It depends on how you define powerhouse. Is PHP my favorite language or framework? No. But the use cases I provide show that it's worthy of consideration. Perl, on the other hand...

You just did to Perl exactly what your article complains about re: PHP.

Re: PHP: the quiet powerhouse

#33

Post by lucperkins »

gnaritas wrote: post #24
techiferous wrote: post #23

If you are just starting out as a web developer and aren't planning on changing careers anytime soon, the #1 language you should learn is JavaScript. It, or languages that compile to it, will still be in fashion in 5 or even 10 years. That's because the web is shifting to thick clients, and JavaScript is the only choice in browsers. JavaScript is also finding its way into server-side code (Node.js). "I think PHP is t…

> Server-side view rendering is on its way out. So this is not a real advantage. No it isn't, client side view rendering is just experiencing a faddish phase; it'll fade. It'll never overtake server side rendering on the web.

I'm not convinced that it will fade, especially given the rise of mobile devices (as the gentlemen has already pointed out) and what I expect will be a marked improvement in browsers in the coming years (Google Chrome/V8 is a good example). The rise of JS libraries that enable you to use models and persistence in the front end make a lot of people really question why going to the server side and asking for a view is always necessary. Still necessary sometimes, absolutely. But better to go to the server side only when necessary.

Re: PHP: the quiet powerhouse

#34

Post by snorkel »

gnaritas wrote: post #24
techiferous wrote: post #23

If you are just starting out as a web developer and aren't planning on changing careers anytime soon, the #1 language you should learn is JavaScript. It, or languages that compile to it, will still be in fashion in 5 or even 10 years. That's because the web is shifting to thick clients, and JavaScript is the only choice in browsers. JavaScript is also finding its way into server-side code (Node.js). "I think PHP is t…

> Server-side view rendering is on its way out. So this is not a real advantage. No it isn't, client side view rendering is just experiencing a faddish phase; it'll fade. It'll never overtake server side rendering on the web.

The seductive advantage of server side rendering is centralized control of what all clients see. Whenever you push too much business logic down to the clients you have to contend with how to ensure all of those clients are using the same logic at all times.

Re: PHP: the quiet powerhouse

#35

Post by [deleted] »

lucperkins wrote: post #27
techiferous wrote: post #23

If you are just starting out as a web developer and aren't planning on changing careers anytime soon, the #1 language you should learn is JavaScript. It, or languages that compile to it, will still be in fashion in 5 or even 10 years. That's because the web is shifting to thick clients, and JavaScript is the only choice in browsers. JavaScript is also finding its way into server-side code (Node.js). "I think PHP is t…

I think you're right about a lot of things. Things like Backbone (which I wrote about at http://blog.appfog.com/putting-some-mvc-meat-into-your-app-b... ) will make recourse to the back end more and more selective as time goes by. JavaScript is indeed quite a force, and as far as I can tell that will stop only when browsers start reading other languages directly (which is not completely unthinkable, but also not real…

[deleted]

Re: PHP: the quiet powerhouse

#36

Post by snorkel »

I've lived Ruby land and Python world for quite some time and I must say it's good to be back in home in PHP where getting things done doesn't involve clever semantics and tying yourself up in layers of abstraction. Oh yeah, and it's nice to read code that has comments explaining what the hell is going on too (seems Rubyists and Pythonistas don't believe in comments, you know, because that'd make the code too obvious)

Re: PHP: the quiet powerhouse

#37

Post by lucperkins »

skymt wrote: post #32
lucperkins wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on how you define powerhouse. Is PHP my favorite language or framework? No. But the use cases I provide show that it's worthy of consideration. Perl, on the other hand...

You just did to Perl exactly what your article complains about re: PHP.

Maybe. I actually like Perl a lot, and there are lots of things you can do with it that you'd never want to use PHP for. The difference is that in the world of web development (and this is the crucial distinction here), Perl has neither the use cases nor the easy uptake nor the development frameworks (Drupal, Joomla, Zend, CodeIgniter, etc.) that PHP has. And so my comment wasn't against Perl tout court.

Re: PHP: the quiet powerhouse

#38

Post by shuzchen »

I don't think MediaWiki or Wordpress are good examples of how PHP scales. Those are the two examples of extremely bloated pieces of software that require a lot of hackage to get to scale. I've done deployments of those on mid sized VPS'es and it's always a pain getting it responsive while still able to hold a good number of concurrent connections.

The only way anyone gets Wordpress to scale is to put caching in front of it. But now the heavy lifting is being done by memcache or varnish, not by anything engineered into Wordpress or PHP.

Re: PHP: the quiet powerhouse

#39

Post by lucperkins »

skymt wrote: post #32
lucperkins wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on how you define powerhouse. Is PHP my favorite language or framework? No. But the use cases I provide show that it's worthy of consideration. Perl, on the other hand...

You just did to Perl exactly what your article complains about re: PHP.

That said, I am indeed among the people keeping my fingers crossed for a Perl renaissance in web development.

Re: PHP: the quiet powerhouse

#40

Post by gouranga »

snorkel wrote: post #36

I've lived Ruby land and Python world for quite some time and I must say it's good to be back in home in PHP where getting things done doesn't involve clever semantics and tying yourself up in layers of abstraction. Oh yeah, and it's nice to read code that has comments explaining what the hell is going on too (seems Rubyists and Pythonistas don't believe in comments, you know, because that'd make the code too obvious…

+1 for pragmatism.

Despite the stigma attached to PHP, it's my go to language for web stuff because it gets shit done very very quickly.

You can't beat drop file, edit, refresh and entire deployments which can be done with cp/scp and no process restarts.

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