Php, Jsp, MySQL, Postgresql
Been digging into some Php code, and it is fascinating to compare to Jsp/J2EE.
Php has a very low learning curve to get started. It’s basically html templated with a c style language.
However the default development model scales badly especially compared to a full J2EE system (or my current preference of Jsp/struts/spring/hibernate)
Amusingly, many professional developers are working against the traditional model – splitting pages into the MVC pattern and using templating engines like Smarty to replace standard Php-in-html.
Still it’s a bit hacky for my liking, and still not particularly robust.
This may change however – Php has what I call MySQL syndrome. A few years back you’d have been mad to use MySQL for serious development – Postgresql was far more reliable. However MySQL was much easier to use, so it attracted a huge developer community – and now it’s a much closer race.
So I’ll keep an eye on Php. Certainly it’s quite viable to use Php on the first tier, doing html and page flow, with XML/RPC or hessian calls to a Java back end…