Web developers notes,programming tutorials.

 

1)     PHP lacks several important features
PHP is specifically web-centric.  This means that many of the features that programmers from general purpose programming languages complain about PHP not having are simply not that important in a web based environment.  Asynchronous execution using threads, for example, has very little use when a browser makes one request at a time.

2)     PHP doesn’t have “real� object oriented programming support.
Knocking PHP because of a lack of OOP support is so “2003�.  While the initial implementation of OOP in PHP 4 was not so great, PHP 5 implemented OOP in a manner that brings it very much in line with the other OOP programming languages out there.  But the difference is that with PHP you don’t HAVE to use objects.  The true definition of flexibility is when you are free to build as the situation warrants.

3)     There are no tools for easing debugging/development problems.
Simply not true.  For example, Zend developed Zend Studio which has all of the features of a modern IDE; profiling, debugging, etc.  There are also several open source applications that aide in this arena.  With the Eclipse PHP plugin coming along, this argument loses even more steam.

4)     PHP is slow
Can be true, doesn’t have to be.  If you take PHP out of the box, throw it on a web server and leave it there you will see lower performance.  But if you build an application that understands caching, loads only what it needs and uses a code cache such as Zend Platform or APC you can get extremely fast performance.  For example, using a caching mechanism in Zend Platform I recently demonstrated reducing execution time on a certain program from 600ms to 7ms.

5)     There are no serious applications written in PHP.
While this is not true (many companies are using PHP in mission critical enterprise applications and there are several large scale applications available for use) the problem is that this statement diverts attention away from what the real question ought to be.  The real question is “What is keeping serious applications from being developed in PHP?�  The former statement is often used in a context of ridicule, guile or wholesale discrimination and seldom backed by fact.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 4:24 pm and is filed under php programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.