DISQUS

Roy · 2 years ago

Great post Eric. As a PHP development firm, we have been waiting for this day for a long time. The release of the framework and Zend's continued commitment to make PHP a viable option in the enterprise is a blessing for the commercial service providers in the PHP community.

Roy
www.varien.com
www.magentocommerce.com

Berislav Lopac · 2 years ago

Just some clarifications in regards to your second sentence: PHP is a Web-specialized development technology, and as such it already has for a long time been at least peer, and in many ways superior, to Java and .NET (which are generic technologies trying to cover most of the modern software development needs).

And as for Ruby on Rails, it is a framework quite different in focus than either PHP or Zend Framework. RoR is oriented towards quick development of simple CRUD (create, read, update, delete) Web applications, while ZF introduces a number of more generic tools that have been lacking in the PHP's standard library, especially in terms of object-oriented programming (PHP supports both procedural and OO style of programming).

I'm always disturbed by the simplified comparisons of apples and oranges which are often used by media when it comes to programming technologies, especially in regards to Web development. It's not really fair to compare these things, because it's like comparing planes, ships and cars: all those things will take you to a destination, but each will have a different set of advantages in different situations.

Or, as has been put a long ago, there's no silver bullet.

Eric Eldon · 2 years ago

Berislav, Zend's framework clearly adopts the MVC method used by Ruby on Rails and other dynamic languages in order to simplify the development process on PHP. Because the point of the article is to consider the business potential of the framework, I think a high-level comparison between various languages is relevant.

But I appreciate what you're saying... I decided to cut out a significant part of the article that went into more detail on the pros and cons of PHP. I didn't think enough readers would want to hear about it here.

Berislav and everyone: is that right, or do you want more technical discussion/detail in these articles?

Nick Gerner · 2 years ago

Nice post, nice graph.

But, PHP 5 not compatible with PHP 4? That's note quite right. I ported an app from PHP 4 to PHP 5 and about the only thing I had to change was some capitalization in some reflection I was doing. But then, I shouldn't have been doing reflection anyway. I've had to do more changes moving from MySQL 3 to 4, or .NET 2 to 3. Or much worse, IE 6 to 7 ;)

Roj Niyogi · 2 years ago

MVC frameworks will take PHP much further than it has already come. Our team in India is now developing on the CodeIgniter framework (which is compatible with PHP4) and quite snappy. The idea behind frameworks allow a level of consistency in coding practice (whether you're using RoR or PHP) so that reading through spaghetti code is no longer a concern.

Berislav Lopac · 2 years ago

For my part, I'm quite fine with technical details being left out from articels on VentureBeat; however, especially because most of the audience here has limited technical knowledge, overly simplified conclusions and comparisons should be avoided. People tend to think in comparative terms, that's normal, but IMO it could easily be dangerous.

The bottom line is that decisions about which technology to use should not be based on simplified comparisons, not even on a single expert's opinion (as developers, like all people, tend to have personal favorites), but instead one should look into the problem being solved, review all the options and then base the decision on the quality of solution in that context, as well as the availability of resources.

Steve · 2 years ago

Any tool or firm for Perl like Zend for PHP? Thanks.

Tom · 2 years ago

Steve - mod_perl or FastCGI for Perl will give you better performance than Zend for PHP.

Matt · 1 year ago

@Tom

If you want performance use Java or C++, if you want to build websites use PHP or Python. If you want to process text files, use AWK or Perl (AWK is faster).