back to article Zend offers PHP cure for Java bloat

Zend Technologies has built an application server for PHP that it hopes can slowly convert frustrated Java programmers as well as those relying on Java on the web and in the enterprise. On Tuesday, the company is expected to unveil the Zend Server, a paid-for PHP stack that comes with service agreements and support and the …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Interesting, but:

    1. Page 2 of the article appears blank to me

    2. How will the recession make it harder for companies to find affordable J2EE devs? Surely, recession = layoffs = increased supply of devs, reduced demand = more, cheaper J2EE devs available.

    3. Drupal is an embarrasment

  2. Avalanche

    Where is page 2

    It looks like the article is missing page 2 (or that page 2 should not be there...)

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Great alternative ...

    ... or not. I write Java for a living. I'd rather nail my nuts to my desk with a rusty fork than write PHP (yes, I have written PHP before too). Hiltons problems sounds like the result of a poor team rather than poor tools. You can have the best tools in the world, but if the team sucks the result will also suck.

  4. S
    Thumb Down

    Cast first the beam out of thy own eye!

    Well moving between Java plaforms is one thing - moving from Java EE To PHP quite another. PHP is still a mess, whether you've got Zend to add a semblance of order to it or not.

    I recently completed a project using the Zend framework, and while it's a good step up from plain PHP, it still has some major flaws. Having to program in PHP is one of them ;) The other is performance - the Zend framework in it's current incarnation is extreemely slow - Probably due to the fact that it dynamically pulls in at least ~40 scripts for each page for each and every page request, no-matter how trivial.

    Another point is that I'm sure there are tons more Java EE peeps out there than Zend peeps - so I don't really get the 'finding staff' benefit. Do they mean you should just chuck together a bunch of cheap PHP devs and let them hack something that almost works in zend? Learning the framework is arguably as much effort as learning PHP itself (and I have to say the documentation is pretty poor).

    I wish Zend luck - but I hope they don't try and slag off other platforms again until they have it right themselves.

  5. Chris

    PHP? Don't make me laugh.

    Java developers are moving away from the EJB approach to a lightweight one - as the articles points out when it mentions Spring, Terracotta and app containers like Tomcat. This doesn't open up a market for PHP, because that technology is a step backwards to the late 90's mess of ASP and spaghetti code. Take it from someone who makes a good living replacing unmaintainable, unstable and insecure PHP calamities with Java applications. Apps written for Hibernate, Spring and Tomcat that typically require less machines to cope with the same capacity as the PHP apps that preceded them. The key thing is to have a competent programmer or team leader who can DESIGN as well as CODE, because creating well structured, testable and scalable Java web apps is significantly easier than creating PHP ones if you know what you're doing.

  6. the unironed
    Flame

    Laughing @ Chris

    I assure you I can write 90's era spaghetti apps that fail to scale in Java just as easily as I can in PHP. Mmmm.... Servlet Bolognese anyone?

    The PHP Frameworks we're talking about here help you structure your app around MVC in the same way Spring does and then provide Rails-like 'turnkey' ORM.

    I've been tech lead on teams of both J2EE and PHP devs doing enterprise apps. PHP's productivity is higher and the developers have cheaper contract rates.

    Chris' comment about Java being "significantly easier than creating PHP ones if you know what you're doing" is complete nonsense.

    You need to "know what you're doing" whatever language you use.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fail - and you

    ----

    This doesn't open up a market for PHP, because that technology is a step backwards to the late 90's mess of ASP and spaghetti code.

    ----

    If you're doing this - you're doing it wrong. Sounds like someone hasn't actually looked at PHP since the "late 90s". The "worst" PHP code I've ever seen was written by ASP coders who treated PHP in EXACTLY the same way as ASP (pre .NET days); there was no abstraction in it really just a mess of application and UI code.

    Some of the "best" PHP code I've seen came from people with a decent knowledge of Java and/or OOP principles... funny that.

  8. John Collins
    Stop

    Roll out the standard anti-PHP FUD

    Reading many of the anti-PHP comments here, its the usual FUD:

    1. It does not scale (tell Facebook).

    2. It is insecure (like Java or any other language is a silver bullet in that area).

    3. It promotes spaghetti code (like Java isn't a race to inter-library-dependency complexity?).

    4. It has inconsistent APIs (different libraries have different API conventions, is that unique to PHP?).

    Yawn!

  9. Dave Ashe
    Thumb Up

    Java the hut - its COBOL for the 21st centuary

    Java is pretty insane to write, requires code generation tools even when working with 'lightweight' frameworks like spring, hibernate etc. which i have had the 'pleasure' to work with in the past.

    Java is a good language for low-level coding like, say, coding an emulator but not for web apps, its like trying to fit a square-shaped peg into a circular hole.

    PHP is designed from the ground-up to build web apps, its not simply just a perl-like language with asp-style tags - theres a lot more under the hood if you look at the features of v5 it has a lot more oo features than java under the hood that don't require the longest line of code in history to use reflection, its just $object->$var

    To open a file its file_get_contents($filename) - in Java you need 3 different types of streams incased in each other just to open the file never mind get its contents.

    Java is bloatware, i'm sorry to say it but its the COBOL of the 21st centuary, c-programming is more pleasurable, even c++ is easier to do something simple like open files.

    While the rest of the world has already moved to PHP, the dying underdogs of the forgotten world are still using the most awkward web-application language ever.

  10. Cees de Groot
    Alert

    FUD or experience, your pick

    PHP scales, but only by relying on solutions that are as shabby and maintenance-intensive as the language itself. I know it, I work for a Very Large Site. Java is not perfect either, and I'm not going to start a language flamewar by putting my personal preferences here ;-), but at the very least it executes faster, has much better tools, and the language simply scales better for big apps.

    That's the reason we're running away from Zend/PHP, not towards it

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