alternatives to php

sheesh

hi all
recent thread showed alot of displeasure with php but what are the alternatives?

RealistSpy

Python or dive into Erlang?

lopesc

Would also be interested in WHY and WHERE the alternatives are better!

Deliverance XXV

Popular server side alternatives include Python, Ruby on Rails, Perl, ASP.net and Node.js (still very much in its infancy).

I wouldn't read too much into the PHP hate. It is still a very relevant scripting language. It is still powerful, easy to pick up, has plenty of support/documentation, secure when used correctly and there is a LOT of frameworks to help ease the load.

I am not one who will say use X over Y but if you are only beginning, make sure to have a look at a few languages to see what takes your fancy.

counterpointaud

Deliverance XXV wrote: »

Popular server side alternatives include Python, Ruby on Rails, Perl, ASP.net and Node.js (still very much in its infancy).

And Java of course ! (Along with other JVM languages, Scala, Groovy etc.)

Some very interesting things happening with ASP.Net at the moment.

Media999

PHP is dead again is it? Java also died several times but funny enough its still here.

ChRoMe

Media999 wrote: »

PHP is dead again is it? Java also died several times but funny enough its still here.

No one has claimed that its dead, just that its a piece of ****.

Colonel Panic

So we all agree PHP and Java are **** but going nowhere?

Talisman

Realistically your alternative options are ASP.NET, Java, JavaScript, Python or Ruby. Developers worldwide are constantly building web applications using one of those languages but PHP is the most dominant server side scripting language.

Mad Benny

Colonel Panic wrote: »

So we all agree PHP and Java are **** but going nowhere?

Can you list out what is **** about Java and PHP and why other languages are better?

I'm not looking for an argument by the way...

Talisman

Mad Benny wrote: »

Can you list out what is **** about Java and PHP and why other languages are better?

Is the answer not obvious? They aren't owned by Microsoft.

zig

Id love to here an answer from someone who genuinely has lots of experience coding in both PHP and some other language. Ive been a PHP developer for a few years and have no issues with it, but then again maybe I dont know what Im missing.

Im learning C# on the side so maybe in time Ill see the light.

ChRoMe

zig wrote: »

Id love to here an answer from someone who genuinely has lots of experience coding in both PHP and some other language. Ive been a PHP developer for a few years and have no issues with it, but then again maybe I dont know what Im missing.

Im learning C# on the side so maybe in time Ill see the light.

This is generally the article that is linked to http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

Colonel Panic

Mad Benny wrote: »

Can you list out what is **** about Java and PHP and why other languages are better?

I'm not looking for an argument by the way...

PHP is inconsistent and often insecure. Java seems to trap developers in a weird rabbit hole of classes with verbs as names and frameworks that only seem to take XML as input and output stack traces.

Colonel Panic

Talisman wrote: »

Is the answer not obvious? They aren't owned by Microsoft.

??

ChRoMe

Colonel Panic wrote: »

??

It doesn't make any sense at all.

Mad Benny

Colonel Panic wrote: »

PHP is inconsistent and often insecure. Java seems to trap developers in a weird rabbit hole of classes with verbs as names and frameworks that only seem to take XML as input and output stack traces.

I get your point about frameworks in Java and XML configurations however you don't have to use it that way. You can chose not to use any framework. Spring is probably the most common Java framework and you can get by now without maintaining any XML. It supports annotations as an alternative.

Your criticisim of Java appears to be a general one on object oriented languages. In a description of a system your classes are nouns and methods are verbs.

Would you have the same complaint with C#, C++ and Objective-C?

A lot of new languages have appeared over recent years but are any of them going to kill off Java for example? I haven't heard of one yet.

Colonel Panic

I *almost* mentioned annotations in the post you quoted, but it suited my agenda a bit better to omit it.

My criticism of Java isn't one specific to OO, more one that is specific to patterns that evolved from OO languages which do not allow top level functions. Plus, "Enterprise" Java seems to be all about the

StaticClassThing.GetInstanceFactory().GetSingleton().GetFrameRenderer().Do();

This is true of C# and even something I've seen spill into C++ code I maintain. I've seen Python classes with no state and one method. Reader dot read indeed...

It's like any medium, it influences the message. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way. The same is true of Objective C and Cocoa. Apple like certain patterns and they've influenced a lot of Swift. Some I think are good, some, like their overuse of the Singleton Pattern, right down to the ****ty dispatch_once mess they use to make singleton creation thread safe really bugs me.

C# has some serious framework WTFs too. Web requests throwing an exceptions for non exceptional things like 500s and 404s... Ugh...

Are those patterns going anywhere? Nope! Does that make it okay? Nope! Can I work around it? Yep!

I never said anything's going to kill anything btw.

Dave!

I started with PHP and now use Ruby. Very nice language, I enjoy using it. But then, I mostly enjoyed using PHP before too.

I'm sure that someone somewhere has written a 5000 word polemic about how sh*t Ruby is too.

The Corinthian

Mad Benny wrote: »

Can you list out what is **** about Java and PHP and why other languages are better?

Java has had numerous Web development implementations over the years, with different application servers, JSP, servlets and so on. Personally, I've always felt that it was never really comfortable with the Web and that development was often uncomfortable and clunky when compared with other languages.

PHP suffers from this to an extent, in that it's been around so long and changed so much that there's been a lot of messy accumulation to the language; it went from a procedural to an OO language, with (IMHO) a horrible syntax for dealing with objects. Again a personal opinion.

Principally, though, the problem with PHP is not the language per say, but the coders. It's so easy to get into that the vast majority appear to be little more than cut 'n paste merchants who write really sloppy code. I wouldn't let most of them near an Office macro, much less serious development. This last comment isn't a personal opinion, unfortunately; it's pretty well accepted.

PHP remains dominant for Web development in the SME sector. It's made some headway in enterprise (helped by its association MySQL), but the latter is still largely dominated by Java and, increasingly, dotNet.

Ruby, Python and so on are up and commers, but still a minority.

Digital Society

The Corinthian wrote: »

Java has had numerous Web development implementations over the years, with different application servers, JSP, servlets and so on. Personally, I've always felt that it was never really comfortable with the Web and that development was often uncomfortable and clunky when compared with other languages.

PHP suffers from this to an extent, in that it's been around so long and changed so much that there's been a lot of messy accumulation to the language; it went from a procedural to an OO language, with (IMHO) a horrible syntax for dealing with objects. Again a personal opinion.

Principally, though, the problem with PHP is not the language per say, but the coders. It's so easy to get into that the vast majority appear to be little more than cut 'n paste merchants who write really sloppy code. I wouldn't let most of them near an Office macro, much less serious development. This last comment isn't a personal opinion, unfortunately; it's pretty well accepted.

PHP remains dominant for Web development in the SME sector. It's made some headway in enterprise (helped by its association MySQL), but the latter is still largely dominated by Java and, increasingly, dotNet.

Ruby, Python and so on are up and commers, but still a minority.

What language would you encourage people to use if there was no external factors such as Java/PHP being so popular already?

The Corinthian

Digital Society wrote: »

What language would you encourage people to use if there was no external factors such as Java/PHP being so popular already?

For someone learning, I'd probably suggest they learn Perl.

For speed of development, PHP.

For career development, C# or Java.

NeDark

What's wrong with PHP? I think PHP has a great potential

Digital Society

The Corinthian wrote: »

For someone learning, I'd probably suggest they learn Perl.

For speed of development, PHP.

For career development, C# or Java.

Good answer. Thanks.

ChRoMe

NeDark wrote: »

What's wrong with PHP? I think PHP has a great potential

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=90745138&postcount=13

PartnerSeeds

My friend used php to build her websites now she never stops talking about how much she loves ruby on rails. Might be worth looking into. I do know there is a bit of a learning curve compared to php

jmcc

Java is a great academic language - just like Pascal was before it. The problem with web development is that neither is well suited to it because web development often involves fixing things on the fly. PHP is largely suited to some kinds of web development because it is, essentially, a web development/scripting language (it can also be used like shell scripting but that's a different argument). There are also other scripting languages that have been designed for web development work. There have been many good suggestions earlier in the thread and Apache has mods for quite a few languages. Rather than asking about which languages are alternatives (such threads generally devolve into arguments over favourite toy languages), it is often better to be familiar with as many of these languages but choose the particular language based on what you want to do with a particular web project. As the guy in the movie 'Ronin' said when asked about his favourite weapon, "it's a toolbox".

Regards...jmcc

amen

jmcc wrote: »

The problem with web development is that neither is well suited to it because web development often involves fixing things on the fly.

If it does then you are doing it wrong. That is why you have Unit/System/Integration/Regression Testing. Web development is no different from other forms of development. While it may lend itself to fixing things on the fly you shouldn't be doing it.

it is often better to be familiar with as many of these languages but choose the particular language based on what you want to do with a particular web project. As the guy in the movie 'Ronin' said when asked about his favourite weapon, "it's a toolbox".

I agree.

oneofakind32

PHP is open source and it has a huge number of open source frameworks and CMSs built on top of it which are widely used and well documented. Thats why i will be using it for a few years to come.

C# is good and I have enjoyed using it in the past but it is propriety to Microsoft and this for me is a huge negative. From a career point of few I think most people are moving toward open source. I worked for a small Web Dev company in Dublin with 4 employees and the boss had to pay €7k a year to licence Visual Studio!

Java was owned by Sun/Oracle but is now open source. It feels like it dying slowly, though you will still find quite a few Java dev. jobs in Ireland but not so much in the US.

Ruby is cool, but still not that widely used. Node.js is the future but right now PHP is still the open source standard for better to for worse.

counterpointaud

oneofakind32 wrote: »

PHP is open source and it has a huge number of open source frameworks and CMSs built on top of it which are widely used and well documented. Thats why i will be using it for a few years to come.

C# is good and I have enjoyed using it in the past but it is propriety to Microsoft and this for me is a huge negative. From a career point of few I think most people are moving toward open source. I worked for a small Web Dev company in Dublin with 4 employees and the boss had to pay €7k a year to licence Visual Studio!

Java was owned by Sun/Oracle but is now open source. It feels like it dying slowly, though you will still find quite a few Java dev. jobs in Ireland but not so much in the US.

Ruby is cool, but still not that widely used. Node.js is the future but right now PHP is still the open source standard for better to for worse.

I've heard this viewpoint put forward a few times over the last few years, and yet the majority of large scale web applications seem to use Java, or at least run on the JVM. Netflix, most Google products, Amazon.com etc. I don't see anybody doing anything like this in Node or PHP, or does anyone have any examples of this?

*EDIT* I know Facebook started on PHP, but they have since rewritten the whole runtime IIRC

oneofakind32

counterpointaud wrote: »

I've heard this viewpoint put forward a few times over the last few years, and yet the majority of large scale web applications seem to use Java, or at least run on the JVM. Netflix, most Google products, Amazon.com etc. I don't see anybody doing anything like this in Node or PHP, or does anyone have any examples of this?

*EDIT* I know Facebook started on PHP, but they have since rewritten the whole runtime IIRC

I don't know of many large web apps running PHP but I know that a large percentage of websites are running WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal, all PHP based. I am surprised that a large web apps would be built Java considering the processing overhead of the virtual machine. This website is based on phpBB right? Its pretty big at this stage.

counterpointaud

oneofakind32 wrote: »

I don't know of many large web apps running PHP but I know that a large percentage of websites are running WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal, all PHP based. I am surprised that a large web apps would be built Java considering the processing overhead of the virtual machine. This website is based on phpBB right? Its pretty big at this stage.

I think Boards moved away from that BB framework when it got above a certain size. JavaEE has addressed a number of problems around scalability that other platforms haven't. Doesn't matter so much if the JVM has an significant overhead if you can keep throwing hardware at it I guess.

ChRoMe

oneofakind32 wrote: »

I am surprised that a large web apps would be built Java considering the processing overhead of the virtual machine.

You are comparing the JVM as slower to a weakly typed interpreted language (PHP)?

Step away from the keyboard.

jmcc

oneofakind32 wrote: »

I don't know of many large web apps running PHP

Does a site with about 500M webpages qualify? PHP is only one aspect of large websites. It is rarely the only part of the site. Most people without any experience of large websites only see a programming language or two instead of the architecture of the site and how a lot of aspects (frontend, scripting, databases, administration etc) have to work together.

but I know that a large percentage of websites are running WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal, all PHP based.

Not exactly large websites or web apps. Most of them have tiny backend databases.

Regards...jmcc

croo

A couple of options not mentioned....
Groovy... with Grails. Though I nearly see this as an extension to Java.
Scala .. with the play network. Technically it's probably also in the Java world but I think most would agree it is something new.

But for me one of the most interesting - though not so popular and probably won't help the CV - is Pharo + Seaside.
Smalltalk was the language I learned Object Orientation with so I have a soft spot for it. But actually combined with Seaside this offers a unique approach, IMO, to web development. Instead of writing code that runs ON a webserver, your web application is effectively extending the smalltalk based Seaside webserver! It is a unique approach that I don't think I've been anywhere else.