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PHP is great if you need to get some small thing up and running yesterday. PHP is also great if an out of the box solution will almost fit the bill due to the f

PHP is great if you need to get some small thing up and running yesterday. PHP is also great if an out of the box solution will almost fit the bill due to the fact that there are so many. Just take a box and do some small modifications, voila, done!

arnorhs 16y ago
...or big thing running yesterday, right? Take Facebook for an example. To me, Facebook seems like a pretty complicated piece of software. The concept isn't very complicated but there are so many features all over the place.
- shod 16y ago
  He didn't say you _can't_ use PHP for such things, he said PHP is "great" for getting smaller sites built quickly. It's possible to build very large apps with PHP alone, if you like, but there are other solutions I think are preferable. Most of them weren't even available when Facebook was born. For example, I would rather build a Facebook-sized app in Rails than a PHP framework, especially with Rails 3's new features. There are some very capable PHP frameworks out there, but you'll still end up writing much larger models and a lot more code than if you were using Rails.
  - wvenable 16y ago
    Rails would get you started on Facebook app quicker, but then you'd be forever fighting the framework to do things outside of it's core abilities. For something as large as Facebook, that will be all the time.
- sanderjd 16y ago
  Seems to me as if Facebook used PHP for the small thing running yesterday aspect - since they've gotten big they've had to switch to different tools.
hackermom 16y ago
Like someone else already said, "small thing"... like Facebook? Like Flickr? Like Wikipedia? Like Digg? :)
- superk 16y ago
  Somewhere I read a quote that went "if you take the top 100 most popular websites on the internet... 90 of them use PHP". I don't have the source and I don't know if it's still true.. but you can add Yahoo, WordPress, PhotoBucket, SourceForge, etc...
- shabble 16y ago
  It's probably fair to say that all of these started out pretty small (and quite a lot time ago). If you're a one-man company with a great idea and possibly not a huge amount of programming experience, then PHP is a fair choice for prototyping your design and getting things off the ground. Then, when you realise it's a runaway success and all the investment starts piling on board, the last thing you want to do is stop and tread water for 6 months whilst you rewrite everything (introducing a whole new set of problems as you do), just to get back up to where you are now, before adding those new features. So, arguably these sites are successful because of their ideas, and the fact that they use PHP is more likely a historical accident than a carefully considered decision, at least in terms of their codebase. To put a positive spin on it, you could argue that their early choice of PHP is what allowed them to become successful by letting them get their ideas out, rather than the best technology for a internet top-100 site or whatever.
  - rick888 16y ago
    "Then, when you realise it's a runaway success and all the investment starts piling on board, the last thing you want to do is stop and tread water for 6 months whilst you rewrite everything (introducing a whole new set of problems as you do), just to get back up to where you are now, before adding those new features." Using Ruby on Rails, .NET, or python won't magically give you great programming skills. If you are a poor developer in general, you will run into problems with all of these languages. "So, arguably these sites are successful because of their ideas, and the fact that they use PHP is more likely a historical accident than a carefully considered decision, at least in terms of their codebase." All sites are successful because of their ideas. Using language X is just a design choice. I carefully choose php for all of my projects because it's better than all of the alternatives. I know I'm not alone in my thinking. "To put a positive spin on it, you could argue that their early choice of PHP is what allowed them to become successful by letting them get their ideas out, rather than the best technology for a internet top-100 site or whatever." A positive spin? How about a bias spin against php. If this were the case, we would see many more sites using other languages because PHP is so terrible. Here is an old article on why the guy from cdbaby.com switched from ruby back to php: http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_switched_back_to_p_1.html http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_swit...

arnorhs 16y ago

...or big thing running yesterday, right? Take Facebook for an example. To me, Facebook seems like a pretty complicated piece of software. The concept isn't very complicated but there are so many features all over the place.

shod 16y ago
He didn't say you _can't_ use PHP for such things, he said PHP is "great" for getting smaller sites built quickly. It's possible to build very large apps with PHP alone, if you like, but there are other solutions I think are preferable. Most of them weren't even available when Facebook was born. For example, I would rather build a Facebook-sized app in Rails than a PHP framework, especially with Rails 3's new features. There are some very capable PHP frameworks out there, but you'll still end up writing much larger models and a lot more code than if you were using Rails.
- wvenable 16y ago
  Rails would get you started on Facebook app quicker, but then you'd be forever fighting the framework to do things outside of it's core abilities. For something as large as Facebook, that will be all the time.
sanderjd 16y ago
Seems to me as if Facebook used PHP for the small thing running yesterday aspect - since they've gotten big they've had to switch to different tools.

hackermom 16y ago

Like someone else already said, "small thing"... like Facebook? Like Flickr? Like Wikipedia? Like Digg? :)

superk 16y ago
Somewhere I read a quote that went "if you take the top 100 most popular websites on the internet... 90 of them use PHP". I don't have the source and I don't know if it's still true.. but you can add Yahoo, WordPress, PhotoBucket, SourceForge, etc...
shabble 16y ago
It's probably fair to say that all of these started out pretty small (and quite a lot time ago). If you're a one-man company with a great idea and possibly not a huge amount of programming experience, then PHP is a fair choice for prototyping your design and getting things off the ground. Then, when you realise it's a runaway success and all the investment starts piling on board, the last thing you want to do is stop and tread water for 6 months whilst you rewrite everything (introducing a whole new set of problems as you do), just to get back up to where you are now, before adding those new features. So, arguably these sites are successful because of their ideas, and the fact that they use PHP is more likely a historical accident than a carefully considered decision, at least in terms of their codebase. To put a positive spin on it, you could argue that their early choice of PHP is what allowed them to become successful by letting them get their ideas out, rather than the best technology for a internet top-100 site or whatever.
- rick888 16y ago
  "Then, when you realise it's a runaway success and all the investment starts piling on board, the last thing you want to do is stop and tread water for 6 months whilst you rewrite everything (introducing a whole new set of problems as you do), just to get back up to where you are now, before adding those new features." Using Ruby on Rails, .NET, or python won't magically give you great programming skills. If you are a poor developer in general, you will run into problems with all of these languages. "So, arguably these sites are successful because of their ideas, and the fact that they use PHP is more likely a historical accident than a carefully considered decision, at least in terms of their codebase." All sites are successful because of their ideas. Using language X is just a design choice. I carefully choose php for all of my projects because it's better than all of the alternatives. I know I'm not alone in my thinking. "To put a positive spin on it, you could argue that their early choice of PHP is what allowed them to become successful by letting them get their ideas out, rather than the best technology for a internet top-100 site or whatever." A positive spin? How about a bias spin against php. If this were the case, we would see many more sites using other languages because PHP is so terrible. Here is an old article on why the guy from cdbaby.com switched from ruby back to php: http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_switched_back_to_p_1.html http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_swit...