6 ms·

No matter how much PHP is improved upon, until there is a serious contender framework for it like Rails or Django, PHP will continue its route to extinction. Di

No matter how much PHP is improved upon, until there is a serious contender framework for it like Rails or Django, PHP will continue its route to extinction. Dinosaurs were once big and powerful. They dominated the landscape. They don't exist anymore.

polyfractal 14y ago
This is also the year of the Linux Desktop.
madoublet 14y ago
The beauty of PHP is that it is simple to learn and easy to setup. That is why it is popular and will continue to be. Additions, such as the easy-to-use password encryption, are brilliant because it will make it even easier to move from adding some dynamic functionality to building a full app.
giulianob 14y ago
There are many that come to mind CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Kohana, etc... are pretty damn good.
billpatrianakos 14y ago
Thanks for coming in and expressing your dislike of PHP. You offer something we surely haven't heard a thousand million times before from other random trolls. Which languages make you cool by mentioning them in passing? Python ans Ruby? Awesome. Didn't know that. Thank you so much for your insightful critique of PHP. "It's old so that makes it bad. Also, some real vague reference to the quality of the language and the current trendy frameworks". That's what I heard when I read that. There is nothing new to say about PHP in this area. Every criticism has been played out and overused here a thousand times over. Thanks for the well formed, specific and detailed opinion that's completely irrelevant in the context of the article.
mootothemax 14y ago
No matter how much PHP is improved upon, until there is a serious contender framework for it like Rails or Django, PHP will continue its route to extinction. I'm not sure if you're serious, but there are plenty of frameworks on a par with Rails at least (nb: I have zero experience with Django). At the enterprise level, there's Symfony or Zend: http://symfony.com/ http://symfony.com/ http://www.zend.com/ http://www.zend.com/ If Rails is your thing, CakePHP shares some concepts (although I'll be the first to admit CakePHP has many flaws): http://cakephp.org/ http://cakephp.org/ Want something lightweight that's easy to jump into? CodeIgniter's the one for you! http://codeigniter.com/ http://codeigniter.com/ And finally, my favourite, Kohana. Absolutely infuriating since they essentially stopped writing documentation for new versions, but if I need to get something written quickly and reliably, this is my go-to call: http://kohanaframework.org/ http://kohanaframework.org/ There are tonnes of "serious" frameworks for PHP (I've certainly missed out a few), and frankly, if you're going to try to attack PHP, this is the wrong angle from which to do so.
- giulianob 14y ago
  I've been using Cake since around 1.1 and it started with a decent base but was not very consistent. I just recently upgraded to 2.2 and I was extremely surprised with the amount of refactor and polish in order to make it a very consistent and powerful framework. It's really top notch nowadays. The performance is also better (used to have to do some "hacks" to get good performance before) but I'm not sure how it compares to others.
  - mootothemax 14y ago
    To be fair, the biggest problem I have with Cake is its ORM; it just feels unnatural to me. You ask for some data, and get back an associative array of values, which you can't do anything with but pass elsewhere. It just lacks a certain sense of OOPiness for me :)
    - harisenbon 14y ago
      I feel the same way, and I've been trying to get away from Cake for a while, but the fact that everything except the quirkiness of the ORM is so nice that I stick with it. Also, the next version is supposed to redo the ORM to return actual models.
      - giulianob 14y ago
        I wonder if the performance will be better or worst though. Creating tons of objects might impact it but they might be able to do more lazy loading to help.
- dt7 14y ago
  There's also Slim: http://www.slimframework.com/ http://www.slimframework.com/ ...which you could equate to something like Python's Flask (I think... I only have limited experience with Flask).
  - polyfractal 14y ago
mjs 14y ago
PHP frameworks are pretty decent, and widely liked (if not loved). Though for some reason this doesn't apply to PHP applications: plenty of people dislike Drupal, or WordPress, or Magento. I'm not sure if there's an equivalent situation across languages--does Ruby or Python have loved frameworks and libraries, but unloved (though widely-used) applications?
- mootothemax 14y ago
  Plenty of people dislike Drupal, or WordPress, or Magento I can't speak for Drupal or Magento, but WordPress's codebase is a world of pain. I've written a few plugins in the past, and the WordPress code is simply hell to work with.
  - TylerE 14y ago
    Drupal is ok, but a bit old-fashioned and quirky. It's highly callback/hook based, which is fine, but it doesn't always have hooks where you need them, in which case it gets pretty ugly. Magento is on a whole other level of suck. I worked on a highly customized Magento site 3 years ago, and it was the worst experience of my professional career - lousy software and client-from-hades. The Magento folder structure is just completely insane...some of the templates are like 8 or 9 subfolders deep, and it's the huge mashed up pile of Zend Framework and homegrown MVC, none of which is well documented (Since after all, they want to push you to paid support...) Oh, and to further cement the suck, the main database tables are in EAV form. Tons of fun to be had.
- blindhippo 14y ago
  Wordpress (as stated earlier) is a gong show. I do think people use Wordpress in far too many use cases where other solutions would work better. If you're a designer type with limited code knowledge, or an IT goon who can't really code but can script, Wordpress is often a good fit. But any experienced software developer is going to take one look at the internals and immediately close the editor. I do hear it's getting better, but it's been a while since I last looked at it. Drupal is an odd duck - it's a framework with a built in CMS. It's immensely powerful for many developers who put the time in to learn it, but the experience is often jarring for traditional "object oriented" developers so they come away with a bad taste in their mouth: "no objects? this is icky!" Of all the major PHP projects, Drupal seems to be the one embracing good software architecture - Drupal 8 looks to be amazing. It's come a long way from the days of Drupal 5.
brusch 14y ago
Disclaimer: I am working for a shop with much PHP knowledge. There are some really nice frameworks for PHP - for example we are using Yii (http://www.yiiframework.com/ http://www.yiiframework.com/), Symfony (http://www.symfony-project.org/ http://www.symfony-project.org/) and Flow3 (http://flow3.typo3.org/ http://flow3.typo3.org/). I was using Yii in one of my projects and it worked really nice (altough I can't compare it to Rails or Django, because I have no experience with those).
- arvidj 14y ago
  Can you tell us more about your experiences with FLOW3? I work a TYPO3-shop, but hadn't had the chance to use neither ExtBase or FLOW3 much, but it looks exciting, at least after some superficial glances.
polyfractal 14y ago
billpatrianakos: FYI, it appears you've been hellbanned, presumably from the last PHP megathread (judging by your comment history and when they started going dead). Might want to contact pg about it.
smsm42 14y ago
Dinosaurs dominated the ecosystem for 135 millions of years out of last 200, and it took a major extinction event - most probably of extra-terrestial origin - which wiped about half of the existing species off the face of the planet to do them away. I think you meant the comparison as insulting, but it actually isn't. You're saying PHP is a T-Rex of web development. It's a nice compliment :)

polyfractal 14y ago

This is also the year of the Linux Desktop.

madoublet 14y ago

The beauty of PHP is that it is simple to learn and easy to setup. That is why it is popular and will continue to be. Additions, such as the easy-to-use password encryption, are brilliant because it will make it even easier to move from adding some dynamic functionality to building a full app.

giulianob 14y ago

There are many that come to mind CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Kohana, etc... are pretty damn good.

billpatrianakos 14y ago

Thanks for coming in and expressing your dislike of PHP. You offer something we surely haven't heard a thousand million times before from other random trolls. Which languages make you cool by mentioning them in passing? Python ans Ruby? Awesome. Didn't know that. Thank you so much for your insightful critique of PHP. "It's old so that makes it bad. Also, some real vague reference to the quality of the language and the current trendy frameworks". That's what I heard when I read that. There is nothing new to say about PHP in this area. Every criticism has been played out and overused here a thousand times over. Thanks for the well formed, specific and detailed opinion that's completely irrelevant in the context of the article.

mootothemax 14y ago

No matter how much PHP is improved upon, until there is a serious contender framework for it like Rails or Django, PHP will continue its route to extinction. I'm not sure if you're serious, but there are plenty of frameworks on a par with Rails at least (nb: I have zero experience with Django). At the enterprise level, there's Symfony or Zend: http://symfony.com/ http://symfony.com/ http://www.zend.com/ http://www.zend.com/ If Rails is your thing, CakePHP shares some concepts (although I'll be the first to admit CakePHP has many flaws): http://cakephp.org/ http://cakephp.org/ Want something lightweight that's easy to jump into? CodeIgniter's the one for you! http://codeigniter.com/ http://codeigniter.com/ And finally, my favourite, Kohana. Absolutely infuriating since they essentially stopped writing documentation for new versions, but if I need to get something written quickly and reliably, this is my go-to call: http://kohanaframework.org/ http://kohanaframework.org/ There are tonnes of "serious" frameworks for PHP (I've certainly missed out a few), and frankly, if you're going to try to attack PHP, this is the wrong angle from which to do so.

giulianob 14y ago
I've been using Cake since around 1.1 and it started with a decent base but was not very consistent. I just recently upgraded to 2.2 and I was extremely surprised with the amount of refactor and polish in order to make it a very consistent and powerful framework. It's really top notch nowadays. The performance is also better (used to have to do some "hacks" to get good performance before) but I'm not sure how it compares to others.
- mootothemax 14y ago
  To be fair, the biggest problem I have with Cake is its ORM; it just feels unnatural to me. You ask for some data, and get back an associative array of values, which you can't do anything with but pass elsewhere. It just lacks a certain sense of OOPiness for me :)
  - harisenbon 14y ago
    I feel the same way, and I've been trying to get away from Cake for a while, but the fact that everything except the quirkiness of the ORM is so nice that I stick with it. Also, the next version is supposed to redo the ORM to return actual models.
    - giulianob 14y ago
      I wonder if the performance will be better or worst though. Creating tons of objects might impact it but they might be able to do more lazy loading to help.
dt7 14y ago
There's also Slim: http://www.slimframework.com/ http://www.slimframework.com/ ...which you could equate to something like Python's Flask (I think... I only have limited experience with Flask).
- polyfractal 14y ago

mjs 14y ago

PHP frameworks are pretty decent, and widely liked (if not loved). Though for some reason this doesn't apply to PHP applications: plenty of people dislike Drupal, or WordPress, or Magento. I'm not sure if there's an equivalent situation across languages--does Ruby or Python have loved frameworks and libraries, but unloved (though widely-used) applications?

mootothemax 14y ago
Plenty of people dislike Drupal, or WordPress, or Magento I can't speak for Drupal or Magento, but WordPress's codebase is a world of pain. I've written a few plugins in the past, and the WordPress code is simply hell to work with.
- TylerE 14y ago
  Drupal is ok, but a bit old-fashioned and quirky. It's highly callback/hook based, which is fine, but it doesn't always have hooks where you need them, in which case it gets pretty ugly. Magento is on a whole other level of suck. I worked on a highly customized Magento site 3 years ago, and it was the worst experience of my professional career - lousy software and client-from-hades. The Magento folder structure is just completely insane...some of the templates are like 8 or 9 subfolders deep, and it's the huge mashed up pile of Zend Framework and homegrown MVC, none of which is well documented (Since after all, they want to push you to paid support...) Oh, and to further cement the suck, the main database tables are in EAV form. Tons of fun to be had.
blindhippo 14y ago
Wordpress (as stated earlier) is a gong show. I do think people use Wordpress in far too many use cases where other solutions would work better. If you're a designer type with limited code knowledge, or an IT goon who can't really code but can script, Wordpress is often a good fit. But any experienced software developer is going to take one look at the internals and immediately close the editor. I do hear it's getting better, but it's been a while since I last looked at it. Drupal is an odd duck - it's a framework with a built in CMS. It's immensely powerful for many developers who put the time in to learn it, but the experience is often jarring for traditional "object oriented" developers so they come away with a bad taste in their mouth: "no objects? this is icky!" Of all the major PHP projects, Drupal seems to be the one embracing good software architecture - Drupal 8 looks to be amazing. It's come a long way from the days of Drupal 5.

brusch 14y ago

Disclaimer: I am working for a shop with much PHP knowledge. There are some really nice frameworks for PHP - for example we are using Yii (http://www.yiiframework.com/ http://www.yiiframework.com/), Symfony (http://www.symfony-project.org/ http://www.symfony-project.org/) and Flow3 (http://flow3.typo3.org/ http://flow3.typo3.org/). I was using Yii in one of my projects and it worked really nice (altough I can't compare it to Rails or Django, because I have no experience with those).

arvidj 14y ago
Can you tell us more about your experiences with FLOW3? I work a TYPO3-shop, but hadn't had the chance to use neither ExtBase or FLOW3 much, but it looks exciting, at least after some superficial glances.

polyfractal 14y ago

billpatrianakos: FYI, it appears you've been hellbanned, presumably from the last PHP megathread (judging by your comment history and when they started going dead). Might want to contact pg about it.

smsm42 14y ago

Dinosaurs dominated the ecosystem for 135 millions of years out of last 200, and it took a major extinction event - most probably of extra-terrestial origin - which wiped about half of the existing species off the face of the planet to do them away. I think you meant the comparison as insulting, but it actually isn't. You're saying PHP is a T-Rex of web development. It's a nice compliment :)