Rediscovering PHP
Feb. 2nd, 2007 11:33 amThis won't be of interest to most of you, but for any web developers...
I have been using a lot of Microsoft ASP.NET at work, and I've been quite impressed by it, especially around the database abstraction and AJAX development areas. So much so that I was considering moving some of my personal web projects to this platform.
However, there were some things troubling me, particularly around the area of ViewState, which can really cause web pages to bloat if not used carefully. The problem is that sometimes coding around ViewState to keep page bloat down can bring pack a lot of the work ASP.NET is supposed to save you from.
So, I've been looking at how some of the same things are done in the latest implementation of PHP, in conjunction with the PEAR library, and I have to say I'm very impressed by what I'm finding. Some of the PHP5 language developments turn it into a really lovely object oriented language. Meanwhile the PEAR library is turning into a wonderfully rich class library that has the potential to be a strong rival for the .NET framework. I've been getting to grips with the MDB2 database abstraction class, which really strikes me as elegant giving a lot of rich features with a high level of performance, while avoiding tying your code to a particular database engine. .NET, by comparison, seems to encourage you to use classes tied to one particular database over the more generic OLEDB classes, which always seemed a retrograde step to me.
And there are some nice-looking AJAX extensions in PEAR, which look very attractive without requiring huge amounts of code.
I'm still keeping my options open, but it looks like PHP/PEAR is in front for my personal sites for the moment.
I have been using a lot of Microsoft ASP.NET at work, and I've been quite impressed by it, especially around the database abstraction and AJAX development areas. So much so that I was considering moving some of my personal web projects to this platform.
However, there were some things troubling me, particularly around the area of ViewState, which can really cause web pages to bloat if not used carefully. The problem is that sometimes coding around ViewState to keep page bloat down can bring pack a lot of the work ASP.NET is supposed to save you from.
So, I've been looking at how some of the same things are done in the latest implementation of PHP, in conjunction with the PEAR library, and I have to say I'm very impressed by what I'm finding. Some of the PHP5 language developments turn it into a really lovely object oriented language. Meanwhile the PEAR library is turning into a wonderfully rich class library that has the potential to be a strong rival for the .NET framework. I've been getting to grips with the MDB2 database abstraction class, which really strikes me as elegant giving a lot of rich features with a high level of performance, while avoiding tying your code to a particular database engine. .NET, by comparison, seems to encourage you to use classes tied to one particular database over the more generic OLEDB classes, which always seemed a retrograde step to me.
And there are some nice-looking AJAX extensions in PEAR, which look very attractive without requiring huge amounts of code.
I'm still keeping my options open, but it looks like PHP/PEAR is in front for my personal sites for the moment.