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Aaron Trevena wrote: > > PHP isn't exactly the nicest language to develop large applications with I'm not sure since the advent of PHP5 that it is particular good or bad in terms of scaling projects. There is a lot of bad PHP out there, and this I found a major issue for learning PHP, because a lot of the examples are either poor, or incomplete. Certainly I've seen a few PHP projects, we host one, where a number of standard PHP5 object libraries were loaded up, and the meat of the application done in just a few lines. So I've seen good clean PHP code that could easily form the basis of big projects, I just don't know enough to write it. I thought the failings of PHP were mostly security related, vagaries over how different servers do escaping/global variables/retrofitting new security, and the odd naming convention for functions (str_replace becomes str_ireplace, ereg_replace becomes eregi_replace etc). I don't think these are scalability issues; indeed if you control the environment PHP runs in, and the standards to which PHP is written, in a project the security and hosting vagaries disappear, and you are mostly left with the weird naming convention, but otherwise perfectly serviceable language. Indeed some of the security tools for PHP mean you can set quite detailed checks to stop PHP apps grabbing resource or doing risky things, which many more secure languages never bothered implementing. Kind of like why Windows has all the best personal firewall products, because in Windows XP it needed them. This document: http://www.tnx.nl/php.html reminded me of Larry Wall's statement about not comparing Perl to a real language (Only they are comparing PHP to Perl). I think there is a strong case if you have an open choice of language for such projects looking for languages with established libraries in the area you need. Here Perl with CPAN are simply amazing, and much as I detest Perl (Larry was right about real languages), you'd be mad to reinvent a lot of CPAN just because you really wanted to use language X instead. It would have to be a very big project indeed to justify much wheel reinventing. That said I'm not sure how extensive Java libraries are, I don't think java.net is anything like CPAN, but there are a lot of commercially relevant Java libraries, so it may depend on the project domain. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html