I'm not trying to start a religious war here, and I do love Perl, but I just can't squander this opportunity to debate with one of the most holy monks, Randal Schwartz :-)
One disclaimer before I start - I haven't used PHP in over a year, so things may have changed in the PHP world, for better or worse.
My experience with PHP was mostly a positive one - I found PHP to
* be very fast, as we had compiled PHP into Apache.
* be nice to program web applications with - right out
of the box(with no additional modules or packages),
you get the ability to mix PHP programming code in with
html. This was new for me, but I quickly grew to
like it - A LOT!
* come stock with a lot of great web stuff, including
a session management framework that allows you to
setup session management in flat files or in the
database of your choice, relatively easily.
The "cons" I found, in comparison to Perl, were
* Perl has(had?) better documentation
* Perl has a better code repository
* Perl has DBI which is the *excellent* Perl "standard"
for interfacing to a database using a database
"independent" interface. This allows you to write
code that is NOT dependent on any one specific
database - therefore, the code allows you to port
to a new database with a minimum of effort.
Perl DBI also has an excellent mailing list, with
LOTS of very experienced people waiting to answer
questions.
At the time(still?), PHP had no equivalent agreed
upon "standard" database independent api. I ended up
writing my own database independent layer in PHP.
So, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend PHP to anyone doing web development. But before jumping to PHP, especially if you're using it to interact with a database, check to see if PHP now supports a "standard" database independent interface.
That said, I still love Perl, and also would recommend Perl for *any* programming task. | [reply]
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mod_perl is extremely fast. See the success stories at http://perl.apache.org.
Granted, mod_perl is extremely fast. I've only done very little mod_perl programming, but what I have done illustrated to me that mod_perl is not trivial to setup - it is very powerful, but with that power and performance comes some complexity. Just my opinion :-)
There are about 30 different ways of mixing HTML and Perl in the CPAN. And what's with this obsession with "out of the box"? I can type one CPAN command to install all of Mason or Template or HTML::Template or EmbPerl. And this way, I can choose which model I want to use, not a lock-in with the One Only Way of PHP.
Again, granted. Perl has had many great modules developed to enable people to program websites more easily. But, you have to choose one, and learn it, and then use it to create your website. With PHP, there is one way to do it - no other packages to know, or download - even if downloading and installing is only a 1-step process.
I'm not attacking Perl - really I'm not! I'm just trying to present PHP as a likable alternative to Perl *for web application programming*. PHP was designed from-the-ground-up for that purpose, whereas Perl was not. If you like Perl, then definitely Perl is a very stable, mature environment where you can find modules that either already do, or make easier, almost any task you need to have programmed - including web development.
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Yeah, coming to Perlmonks to ask if PHP should be used is just begging for abuse.
Maybe he should go with the PHP, seeing as he apparently enjoys abuse. :-) | [reply] |