› 2008: The end of PHP?
Happy New Year people, welcome to 2008.
2008 is the year when PHP 4 stops getting supported, August 8th 2008 (or 08-08-08) is d-day for the end of security fixes on the PHP 4 branch, the final bug fixes have already been released.
PHP has great advantages and disadvantages. It's easy to learn, it's fast, and it's used to run some of the biggest web applications on the internet such as Facebook and MediaWiki (Wikipedia), however in my opinion PHP nativly encourages people to program in a sloppy way, which can quickly become a maintainability headache. This is before taking into account the transition from PHP4 to PHP5 and the timescale available before a security hole is found after 08-08-08.
There are of course new kids on the block, namely Ruby on Rails and my personal favorite Django, OK so these are "frameworks" and not languages like PHP is, but from the outset of a new project working with these tools, you're sent in the right direction.
I used to be a pretty big PHP "fanboy", always recomending it to people, especially those on the ASP train, however i couldn't imagine recommending it to anyone anymore. I'd recommend either Rails or Django, they're both written to create web applications, and to create them in a maintainable way, from the start. They both have great communities of support and high class documentation, so my question is, Would you still recommend someone to use PHP to build a web application?
by Ben on 18:05, January 6, 2008
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I've just written up a post that's not a direct an answer to this but it covers some related issues, if you fancy a look (don't know if your comment field supports html):
http://matt.tarbit.org/2008/01/12/deploying-web-frameworks
I reckon my answer to your question would probably be: "that's entirely dependent on their skill level". There's far too many high-level concepts in the new frameworks that you need to be able to glom from the outset to use them properly. PHP eases you in gently but the learning curves for Django & Rails start about halfway up the Y axis.
p.s. No email / url field in your comment form?
by Matt Tarbit at 11:55, January 12, 2008
Hey! Your comment form just ate half my comment.
Om nom nom. Hope it was tasty.
by Matt Tarbit at 11:57, January 12, 2008
Yeah, blame that comment eating on poor database design! It should be back now!
by Ben at 09:15, January 13, 2008
Yay! Cheers. Good save :)
Here's another one that's more specifically about PHP:
http://matt.tarbit.org/2008/01/13/ian-bicking-what
by Matt at 10:42, January 13, 2008