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Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

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Re: Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

#71

Post by dpcan »

drakaal wrote: post #5

PHP continues to thrive because of WordPress and PHPBB. There are so many sites running these two pieces of software that PHP will be a top language for years. PHP is also one of the easiest languages for Designers to learn. If you know HTML, adding a few bits of PHP is easy. Even if you dislike PHP, (I certainly do) you end up getting good at it because enough projects touch it that you kind of have to be good at it…

I think you're right mostly because of WordPress.

In 10+ years of professional web development, I've had, I think, 1 client ever who had PHPBB on their site, but I work on at least 1-5 sites a month that are running a variation of WordPress (or just PHP in general). And every new site we setup is running WordPress on the back-end now.

I've also never had a client come to me who was running a Ruby, Python, etc, system. The strangest it has gotten was a Cold Fusion site here and there, and maybe once a year a .Net / ASP site crawls through the door..... and we have pretty religiously completely converted the sites to PHP in these cases before we start to manage them.

Re: Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

#72

Post by swalkergibson »

pessimizer wrote: post #67

Because the vast majority of PHP programmers began their programming journey by trying to post from a form built with static html, and worked their way down. In my experience (YMMV), they tend to lack the general programming concepts and practices that programmers who come from a CS/general computing (instead of web design) background are more likely to have, making it more difficult for the PHP programmer to move in…

I have a bone to pick with your last contention. At what load does the PHP runtime begin to become the performance bottleneck, particularly with APC enabled? As far as I know, Facebook is about the only application with enough load to test the limits of the PHP interpreter itself. I was under the impression that PHP itself is actually quite performant...

Re: Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

#73

Post by sanderjd »

bcoates wrote: post #18
fleitz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's because PHP operates at thermodynamic equilibrium and creating order from those states requires the expenditure of energy. Rails is great for creating a site with a form where people can upload images, it's a 20 to 30 minute project in rails, pretty much just take any rails blog tutorial and add paperclip. (Note, it's not a 20 minute project for anyone who doesn't already know rails) Rails is not for non-…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_external_defibrillato... -- the AED is worse in every way than a properly trained professional with the right tools, except for one way: its there, it sort-of works, and you can't beat something with nothing. Requiring a professional is a flaw, not a virtue. It's particularly problematic in our industry, where the end-user and most of the people involved in the production are no…

Wow this is a really intriguing philosophical difference. I'm a big fan of specialization. I think it is the only way a complex society could possibly function. I'm glad that as an end-user of cars, airplanes, trains, medicine, MRIs, television, movies, wine, beer, liquor, the legal system, government services, etc. etc. etc. I don't need to be an expert in their design, development, and maintenance. It's great that because of its nature, software is more accessible than most things, but that doesn't mean it should all be made by non-professionals. There's plenty of room for both non-professional and professional tools, and neither approach is fundamentally flawed.

Re: Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

#74

Post by mscottmcbee »

film42 wrote: post #59
mscottmcbee wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said anything about giving up?

You're right, you didn't. But, would you use rails again for your next project? The tone of your comment sounds like you'd like nothing to do with it next time around. I didn't mean for my comment to come off as snobby, I just hope you don't discard rails/ruby (or branching out from php) because you feel it's not the easiest to work with out of the box (even if only for non-technical people).

No, I'm not out right discrediting it, but given how little I do in web and how small most of my experiments are, I probably won't use it for a long time just because I don't need what it provides.

Re: Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

#75

Post by saraid216 »

orblivion wrote: post #40
mikeryan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making the mistake of conflating PHP the language with Rails the Framework. I can do your app in Rails pretty damn quickly at this point (with one of my current skeleton frameworks I can add authentication administration and other nice features pretty much "for free" as well) But tell me I have to do it CodeIgniter or Laravel and I'd be completely lost for days.

The question then is, can you throw together a website in Ruby? Plus, have your non-technical folks be able to edit the templates?

Define "non-technical". Are we talking "I need teh WYSIWYGz" or "Cascading styles like a boss"?

Re: Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

#76

Post by sanderjd »

mscottmcbee wrote: post #2

I don't do much web development, just a product once every year or so to play around with an idea. Always in PHP. A few months ago I was asked by a close friend to help them with a not-so-serious site. I decided that I'd use Rails, because, hey, I've heard nothing but good about it from HN and the like. I was absolutely blown away by how much work it required to get started. That, and how painful it was to explain to…

> ...I assumed a site where you could upload images via a form and then browse and view them was right up its alley

Ah, your assumption was correct but incomplete. Doing that and a bunch more is right up its alley, but if you're doing only that, there are much easier ways.

Re: Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

#77

Post by mmahemoff »

oinksoft wrote: post #68
mmahemoff wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here. That's what I meant. We often compare PHP to e.g. Ruby/Rails, Python/Django...but what we're really thinking of when we think of PHP is CGI. Most of the same things we say about PHP deployment (it's easy, can be done in one file, etc) could equally be applied to writing CGI scripts in Ruby or Python. PHP is just a more extreme example of CGI, and arguably easier, because there's so much support for PHP-based…

I'm afraid you're misinformed. When we think of PHP, most of us are thinking of PHP embedded in the Apache web server using the mod_php extension. This is what almost everybody was using until very recently when FastCGI gained some popularity and people started using PHP-FPM with nginx. Pretty much any PHP host will be running a LAMP stack with mod_php.

OK most hosts will be running mod_php or fcgi and not pure CGI. I just mean CGI as a shorthand for this approach. It doesn't make a difference from the developer's perspective on a shared host. It's still just "here's a file I created, now point your browser at it".

Re: Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

#78

Post by vlucas »

mscottmcbee wrote: post #2

I don't do much web development, just a product once every year or so to play around with an idea. Always in PHP. A few months ago I was asked by a close friend to help them with a not-so-serious site. I decided that I'd use Rails, because, hey, I've heard nothing but good about it from HN and the like. I was absolutely blown away by how much work it required to get started. That, and how painful it was to explain to…

It's funny too that upload functionality is mentioned here in your base requirements, because that alone is a whole bunch more steps when deploying to a PaaS like Heroku. You don't have a local filesystem, so you have to find and use gems like carrierwave, signup for Amazon S3, create a bucket, configure it in your Rails app, etc. etc.

Re: Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

#79

Post by dinduks »

Your comparison is invalid and irrelevant. You're comparing writing a simple PHP script on a remote server to deploying a full Rails app. Please do the same comparison with Rails vs Symfony/ZF and then we'll talk about it.

When I used to be a Ruby developer, every time I heard that "PHP is easy to deploy", I made a less-than-one-minute demo showing how to create a Sinatra app from scratch and deploy it on Heroku is just few commands (any Sinatra dev here can do it).

Re: Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

#80

Post by vlucas »

bcoates wrote: post #18
fleitz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's because PHP operates at thermodynamic equilibrium and creating order from those states requires the expenditure of energy. Rails is great for creating a site with a form where people can upload images, it's a 20 to 30 minute project in rails, pretty much just take any rails blog tutorial and add paperclip. (Note, it's not a 20 minute project for anyone who doesn't already know rails) Rails is not for non-…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_external_defibrillato... -- the AED is worse in every way than a properly trained professional with the right tools, except for one way: its there, it sort-of works, and you can't beat something with nothing. Requiring a professional is a flaw, not a virtue. It's particularly problematic in our industry, where the end-user and most of the people involved in the production are no…

I spent most of my life in PHP, and now spend most of it in Ruby/Rails and mobile development. Believe me, people can make utter messes no matter the language. This is not as strong as an argument as you think it is. I've seen my fair share of terribly coded Rails apps as well as PHP ones.
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