Professional PHP

PHP Programming, Web Development, PHP Advocacy and PHP Best Practices.

Keywords and Language Simplicity

October 11th, 2007

Well, I like programming language comparisons, so how could I resist this chart (via) promoting the simplicity of the io language by pointing out how few keywords it has. The interesting thing about this is that Java and PHP are tied on this measure of simplicity with 53 keywords. Perhaps that reflects Java’s [...]

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Programming Language Trends via Google

May 10th, 2006

There is a new google toy as of today: Google Trends. So of course, I wanted to see how PHP is faring on the trendy landscape. Here is a comparison of PHP, Java, C#, and Perl:

PHP Java C# Perl

PHP seems to be holding steady, or slightly declining. [...]

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James Gosling on PHP

March 11th, 2006

James Gosling, the “father of Java,” recently commented on PHP:

“PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems,” he continued, “but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance [...]

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Comparing PHP with other languages

February 9th, 2006

Chris Shiflett posted some thoughts on PHP and Ruby on Rails which has generated some interesting discussion. Chris divides programming languages into two categories:

Flexible and powerful: PHP, C, C++, and Perl.
Structured and organized: Java, Ruby, and ASP.NET.

I don’t disagree with the cultural grouping. PHP’s cultural heritage is definitely in the Unix programming, C/Perl [...]

29 Comments | Read the full post »

PHP Book sales trends versus Java and Ruby

December 8th, 2005

O’Reilly radar has an interesting graph of 2004 versus 2005 book sales for a variety of languages. The big news is that Ruby books sales are up 1552% and Java book sales are down 4%. This would be consistent with my observations from Why isn’t PHP the natural successor to Java. A [...]

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Why isn’t PHP the natural successor to Java?

September 29th, 2005

Loud thinking declares that Java has lost its aura of invincibility. Jason Hunter sums it up nicely:
Ruby on Rails today looks poised to eat Java’s mindshare on the web tier. If not Rails, then something else.
It does seem like Java’s mindshare is on the decline, along with sun’s fortunes. There is some evidence that [...]

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PHP Development From Java Architects Eye

April 23rd, 2005

Simple Thoughts blog has a post on PHP development from a Java architects eyes. This post highlights the paradigm difference between programming in PHP and programming in Java:

In PHP multi-threaded programming using ticks is rather primitive, to put it politely. I couldn’t find any way to share data between multiple invocations of the script, [...]

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PHP first impressions from a J2EE programmer

February 19th, 2005

I ran across Cedric Otaku’s blog entry about his first impressions working with PHP as an experienced Java programmer. Not surprisingly, he chose PHP partly because it was already available on his ISP.
He highlights syntax, available libraries and string handling as PHP’s strengths.
He has some problems with the scoping rules and with the [...]

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A Comparison of the PHP and Java Job Markets

October 15th, 2004

This is a followup on Marco Tablini’s discussion of the PHP programmer availablity and my earlier attempt at defining enterprise PHP.
Out of curiosity, I cataloged the required skills for 10 Java web developer positions and 10 PHP web developer positions from monster.com. I wanted to make the point that the constellation of skills for [...]

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Why PHP is easier to learn than Java

August 4th, 2004

I ran across a Novice java programmer’s mistakes and Common java programming errors page. This is a dubious exercise, but I am going to try and use these pages to compare the learning curve of Java and PHP.
This is inherently unfair, as these are lists of known learning problems in Java that might not [...]

14 Comments | Read the full post »

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    My name is Jeff Moore. I'm a PHP programmer living in San Francico and working for a startup.

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