From: E F van de Laar <emiel@...>
Date: 2003-05-06T04:52:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Why is PHP so popular?  What can we learn from the PHP camp?

* Phil Tomson (ptkwt@shell1.aracnet.com) wrote:
> ....and what can we learn from PHP's rapid rise to success?

Just wanted to mention that in all the replies so far no one has
mentioned Java. Applications servers built on J2EE and running Servlets
are on the rise and fast. I admit that I have only looked at Servlets
for about a week but the benefits were clear to me.

 o You have a full fledged OO programming language at your disposal

 o Servlets stay in memory and can easily maintain state. Sessions.

 o Speed on par with FastCGI. I think?

 o Full JDBC connectivity.

 o Application Server availability (Tomcat) i.e. it's free.

I only brought this up is that if I had to choose between PHP and
servlets today I would go with servlets simply because I've done
PHP and I struggled with it. Why? At the time it wasn't a "real"
programming language and all the apps I looked at seemed hackish.

Simply put. On the web development front there is more than PHP alone.

As far as why PHP was/is successful?  Beginners like tutorials. If I
remember correctly this is what attracted the majority of HTML only
hackers which was a huge group of people. It was simply THE answer
for dynamic web sites.

Finally I must say that I personnaly believe that Ruby could do quite
well in the web development front, but it isn't a new market. So
gaining market share is going to be very difficult.

Cheers,

Emiel
-- 
E F van de Laar
+31648183479
www.il.fontys.nl/~emiel