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Apache Options
- PHP
- I've used PHP extensively off and on over the years. Its Perl-ish
simplicity often brings a good deal of development speed and quick wins
are nice. The wide array of databases supported (with persistent connections)
and other extensions make it very appealing as well.
However, we rejected PHP for our architecture because of some crucial
design and language problems. The important ones were:
- Function duplication. Last I looked there were 6 different sort functions
and none did the sorting that I needed.
- Database API's vary widely from database to database unlike Perl's DBI or
Java's JDBC API.
- Difficulty with the object model. Defining classes and creating objects
to package up data and methods was not a well understood or documented
capability.
- Template code must be expressed top to bottom, having calculations
performed outside of the sequence of HTML parsing is not possible
- No caching, if the home page is requested 100 times per second, the
code gets re-evaluated
For the first three issues, we turn our attention to Java and Perl
solutions. For the latter two, we have to consider component systems that
are implemented in those languages. I understand that the PHP community is
aware of these items and perhaps have addressed them since I last made any
substantial use of PHP (Fall 1999).
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