is PHP Dying?

I'm sure it will some day. Things have a way of evolving way beyond realistic expectations...

 

I use ASP.NET - and I find it limited to Intranet applications. It's nice you can use your Windows network login permissions to work with the same permissions on the database and the applications. But I find my applications do not scale up to bigger projects.

• User permissions do not scaleup to work on the internet
• Microsoft Passport is not popular enough for user permissions to work well.
• HTML objects (DataGrid etc) have too much dependencies to Internet Explorer - browser specific

I have used a number of clunky Insurance and travel sites using JSP but there are far more PHP sites in the same industry., tells me PHP is more popular for such sites.

I would like to know what limitations your having implimenting PHP in huge enterprise wide applications One of the excuses I hear is that you do not have a GUI environment but that is not true there are a handful of applications that try to address this issue.

A good place to learn how PHP scales up for large applications is to follow the IBM PHP tutorials using Drupal

I think its a good idea to use JSP/ASPX for enterprise applications but if you want to scale to bigger applications and go world wide go with PHP. The side benefit is you will also interface with a lot more third party tools and applications.

 

If you think fast development in Ruby on Rails is threat to PHP than visit and download symfony framework. You can do scaffolding in PHP using this framework
http://www.symfony-project.com/

 

krakjoe,

Thank you so much, I am about to have a field day now, so much to read on this subject. Cannot believe I had not heard of these sooner!

 

Ruby, please don't make me hurl. j/k.... sort of.

Sorry, I follow the religion PHPanity.

Rails does look very promising, I will keep my eye on it. But to replace php? Not gonna happen

 

Why would you try to use windows authentication over the internet? That's just silly. Switch to Forms authentication.

I'm assuming you mean the authentication issue? Have you looked at the new authorization stuff in 2.0? It's a lot more powerful/secure than anything I'll ever (want to try to) write.

There are definitely some flaky bits and pieces. That's true with anything you use. The very fact that you mention DataGrid instead of GridView tells me you've been playing with 1.1. That version was awful (IMO).

You have to deal with cross-browser incompatibilities no matter which programming language/platform you choose. It's just a fact of life.

I can't speak for the original poster. But PHP, as a language, really seems to encourage developers to lock in on the minutia, instead of stepping back, doing some architecting, and thinking about how the pieces really interact. It's so easy to just hack things together really fast that, when it comes time to scale up, you have a nightmare on your hands.

Of course it's possible to write good, healthy, enterprise-level applications in PHP. It's just been my experience that the language really doesn't encourage that approach. (Whereas asp.net pretty much requires it).

Acck! What a URL! But it does look like an interesting series of articles.

I also feel that I should mention that I'm impressed by how much drupal (and a few other CMS's) seems to have advanced over the past year(-ish).

So, wait. Can anyone explain how this breaks down for me? It seems like we have Small, Medium, Large, Huge, Ridiculous, Enterprise, and World-Wide? But it doesn't really break down by size.

I've done one world-wide sites in asp.net that I wouldn't consider even close to Enterprise-grade (it only took about 6 web servers to handle the front-end load). There is absolutely no way I'd have tried to do them in PHP. The logic, interactions, rules, and such were just far too complicated.

(For one of them, at least, just to dredge up an earlier post in this thread, I'm pretty sure the ultimate back-end part of it was written in COBOL).

Very, very true. There are also many projects I've worked on where asp.net was just complete overkill and a waste of time. I'm not advocating one over the other...every programming language has a time and place. The more you know, the better your chance to pick the proper one for a given job.

I was just disagreeing with what you were saying about asp.net's authentication/authorization pieces.

 

PHP is a good language for suitable problems,
and there is very much ready to use code around,
thus PHP would be used yet for a long time, ...

 

Why would you think PHP is dying? lmao, I think its growing if anything. These other methods people talk about are nothing but talk.

 

I ' ve been playing with PHP and PHPCake for few days and i wish J2EE is as easy in learning and hosting.

 

Dying is it, people don't even know about it properly .....

 

Are you kidding?

JSP is a resource exhaustive programming language not support in most shared hosting services while Ruby on Rails is just another attempt to find a PHP substitute but poorly supported.

Have you seen the lack of scripts based on Ruby?

 

Hey ! Let me tell you this - php will not die until Im alive. Seriously, I just started php programming but I like it. You cannot compare javascript with php because its entirely different things. You can compare it to asp which can do the same thing. But javascript will never replace php because its not possible
php is server-side scipting, javascript is client-side scripting. they cannot replace each other

 

Damn I hope so. What a BS "language".

 

Thanks for a good read and valuable input. Your right., I am stuck at 1 and need to look at 2.0.

I have not found a silver bullet that works well (If there was one I would not have a job )
My preference is to use frameworks particularly Drupal since it has fewer inflexible stuff in it - does not have Adodb - I found a new framework.

I have been playing with delphi for php ( Delphi4PHP ) - and I am blown away with what it can do. If there are others interested in a review using this PM me in a few days.

 

Well, thanks for the opinions, I'm a PHP freak also and I don't want it to die.
I just feel that it is loosing the "easy" part in search for more professional features so at some point it may become more complicated.

I agree that other scripting languages or programming languages are not easy to learn. PHP has great resources and it is very, very easy to learn.

 

Not dying, just maturing -- ruby and the rest are alternatives and will certainly build market share, but PHP is too established and effective to die-out anytime soon.

It will take a paradigm shift in web technology to see the currently established players such a PHP & (D)HTML die.

 

Not at all. As long as it is free, it is almost unbeatable.

 

Just looking at the forums a moment ago.

PHP (29 viewing)
ASP (5 viewing)

It's not going away from here.

 

Don't think so. Though the next language is gaining popularity is Ruby, ROR.

 

PHP will never die. It's immortal, unless another immortal cuts it's head off... oh wait, I've been watching too much Highlander...

Sorry, Long LIVE PHP!