Javalobby - Comments for "Open-source Web applications, PHP vs. Java (Part 1 of 2)"

It won't be justifiable to

nitinpai — Sat, 03 May 2008 11:22:40 -0400

It won't be justifiable to compare a horse with a dolphin, right? I am not providing an analogy but wanted to make my view clear. I am sure that in future Java would definitely come neck to neck with what PHP and Ruby have achieved in the "open source web applications scope".

As the title suggests, the

sky_HALud — Fri, 02 May 2008 03:41:25 -0400

As the title suggests, the scope of the comparison was open-source Web applications outside the enterprise. Nobody is questioning the unsuitability of PHP for the enterprise. Atlassian does have some high quality products in the areas analyzed, but they are neither open-source nor lightweight.

Reading this article one

nitinpai — Fri, 02 May 2008 03:26:25 -0400

Reading this article one would be bound to feel that PHP scores over Java. But I have a different opinion. The comparison done above are majorly related to the web application used for common usages. Like Blogs, Wiki's CMS which have become a norm for any organization lately. Yes, Java may not be a major contendor in these spaces but it was never meant to be. It started out with applications which utilized remoting services. After establishing in that space it tried to make its mark in the web application development since nowadays the web rules.

Having said that, it would not be justifiable to compare the "web based" approach of PHP and Java. With PHP you can make web applications, fine. But can you make an entire application for an Enterprise. Okay I have bought in the big "E" but the fact is, huge applications need robustness and scalability. Can it be done using PHP. Will an organization be able to build a banking application using PHP? Such applications are complex and contain enormous critical features which include transactions, security, messaging etc. And moreover having done the application it should be scalable as industries scale up the volume of business quite quickly especially in the finance domain. I have seen applications which have the utmost complexity built into them and so many different product of J2EE utilized in them. And the J2EE stack does quite well in bridging the components.

The J2EE stack has been maturing from the past and it has been changing drastically with the advent of EJB3, Annotations, Grails, OSGI, etc. It is trying to tame a mammoth just for making the work of developers less, which will definitely take time. But can PHP scale up to the same level as J2EE (its now Java EE) in the future.

If you ask me what would I choose to develop a blog application, my answer would be definitely PHP or Ruby. But if I ask you to build a full fledged financial application would your answer be PHP? The comparison does not come on similar terms in my opinion. As far as hosting is concerned, once again it has been mentioned PHP is the better one. But it is only limited to hosting your blogs, wiki's and CMS. Coming back to financial institutions, they have their own servers to host the applications. Why would any big organization go for 3rd party hosting? It violates their security as well.

I did not find a mention of Atalssian Confluence in this entire article. Major organizations prefer it for their online knowledge management and what about bug tracking systems like JIRA. Obviously PHP cannot scale up to the size as them. Confluence too has the plugin system as Wordpress.

So all in all, both the technologies have their fare share in the things they are doing the best. It only depends on where they are compared to vizualise the potential benefits.

10 years ago I was

tpanula — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 05:41:23 -0400

10 years ago I was developing applications with ColdFusion and ActiveServerPages. ASP was full of crap at that time, mysterious database errors etc. However, I have never been so productive as I was when I did CF. There arised few problems though. The problems were targeted with a light gun and I felt I needed a better tool, so I switched to Java.

After 10 years of Java programming - have I gotten a heavier gun? Yes. What about productivity? Down in the rabbit hole. It's like.. every project went on to search a better method of doing things because of problems met with earlier approaches. Tried JSTL here, mvc XML/XSLT there and pure JSP at somewhere else. The Magical API just isn't there. The problem is that for some very odd reason every Java project try to become bigger than they really should be. Practically every opensource java library adds gazillion JARs and when you do that, your memory requirement goes up like a rocket. So there you are, screaming "I WANTED SOMETHING LIGHTWEIGHT" and your application has a number of libraries some of them causing odd Exceptions you have no clue about.

Meanwhile in the PHP world.. The PHP has had some very serious issues. They have been modifying the core api quite a many times which has broken the older code and caused me some mistrust with that technology. Some years ago I had to write a few PHP projects, so I spent few days and wrote a form, validation, database, session classes myself - on top of the standard PHP code, simply because I wanted to isolate myself from the possible changes in the underlying technology. These were well spent few days. Productivity went up the roof. I used Smarty on the presentation layer and I organized all my other code to produce stuff that Smarty can swallow. I even did few nice templates that can print out a basic form simply by configuring it easily. I still hate the PHP, but love the productivity with it.

Back in the Java world. Searching for the Magic bullet, which isn't there. I have now quit searching for new APIs even though they seem simple at first glance. Most of them are simply new gimmicks which looks good and then hit you hard with sledgehammer and I have to start looking at just another new API. These are not the solution to the productivity and at the end of the day it's what counts.

What I did? I started writing my own lightweight APIs that work for me. If something goes wrong I can only blame myself, but if that happens - I can fix it myself. The only bigger problem, so far, is the lack of template engine that offers at least the same capabilities as smarty but writing a one by myself is simply too much. Many Java template engines boast how they can produce html, sql, xml, pdf .. but can't accomplish simple thing: template must be so easy that a HTML designer/graphician can learn it very quickly. Take a look at http://smarty.php.net/ and compare that documentation to Java template engines. You decide what you like, but I do like Smarty approach.

Quercus (Caucho's PHP5 implementation in Java) just might do the trick in mixing Java and PHP. Getting the best of two worlds could be the new path for Java on the server? Same happened to ColdFusion already. When guys at LiveSoftware added ColdFusion support to the JRun Server - the manufacturer of Cold Fusion - Allaire bought them. I don't know what's the current status but I think at least some version of the official Cold Fusion was written in Java. Allaire then went on and was merged to Macromedia and which was then again merged to Adobe.

Maybe something similar happens with the Java and PHP, too?

peterkirn wrote: Yeah, I'm

qweniden — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:46:10 -0400

peterkirn wrote:

There is no question in my mind that PHP needs less server resourses to run than Java. Ive seen too much evidence to the contrary. Its because of the very different architectures. Im not saying PHP is faster or a better technology, simply that he can handle more concurrent traffic than Java can on a comprable system.

I really believe the world needs a JSP-like techology that runs like PHP. It would basically be be a mod_java type thing that invokes a VM with garbage collection and JIT technolgy turned off for each process. It shouldnt be based on servlets or anything. I dont think it would be that hard.

Yeah, I'm with some other

peterkirn — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:49:22 -0400

Yeah, I'm with some other commenters here ... look, I love Java to death, but it's just not the right platform for *everything* -- it shouldn't be. I don't think hosting alone is the answer here. I've found with heavily-trafficked PHP sites, you really need a dedicated server; those cheap hosting solutions aren't all they're cracked up to be for PHP any more than Java. PHP just happens to be a good choice for these particular kinds of projects, and there's a community around them, and a long history of development there. I don't see anything wrong with that.

Where I'm really looking at Java is RIA and client, in which case it can complement these solutions; that's why JavaFX is so important.

The elephant in the middle

jimben — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:40:02 -0400

The elephant in the middle of the room that everyone want to pretend isn't there is .NET.

I'm not a Microsoft shill; hear me out.

Useable .NET hosting is about as cheap (under about $10/month) as useable PHP hosting. There are arguably more open-source forum, blog, wiki and CMS options in the .NET space than there are in the Java space (look around on codeplex.com and csharp-source.net and see for yourself). If someone wants to build new and interesting functionality on an existing stable, object-oriented, type-safe, managed-code, scalable platform with civilized code syntax and easy-to-manage, cost-effective hosting, then they might turn to .NET before they turn to Java. And that would be a loss for the Java platform.

By only catering to deep-pocketed, big enterprise-with-a-capital-E organizations that can afford to host their own servers, the Java community is missing out on a huge opportunity to serve an important, growing, enthusiastic user base. I can just hear all the zealots shaking their heads, thumping their chests and pontificating about the technical superiority of their favorite platform, and how evil and misguided the Microsoft platform is. I'm not going to get into that debate, because it doesn't matter. I just have two words to say about it: Sony BetaMax.

I love the Java platform. But it scares me to think that it's Balkanizing itself by creating too many choices for developers, without producing complete end-to-end solutions that are economical to implement (that includes the hosting story).

I find two recent developments in the Java space encouraging. First, OSGI might allow application servers to be better managed in cost-effective virtualized and shared hosting environments. Second, the full open-sourcing of Java should allow it to be bundled more consistently in most Linux distributions, allowing it to achieve the ubiquity that PHP now enjoys.

It may be that the Java community has been optimizing the wrong things. Platform choice has to be a matter of superior cost-benefit, not just superior technology. 'Better' isn't better if it's cost-prohibitive, or so complicated that it's risky.

99% of everything I do

rh17781 — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:25:57 -0400

99% of everything I do amounts to get data out of a database (MySQL typically) and displaying it to the user and occasionally taking it from the user and putting it in the database. Just about any decent scripting language would suite. PHP + MySQL meets the write once run anywhere promise that Java made. I have a fair amount of experience with Java and love it as a language but most people I know working with it now are over engineering products. It is a mind set thing really. The wonderful thing about webservices and websites is no one knows whether you are a few hundred lines of PHP script or several meg of Java libraries - and guess what - nobody cares :)

sky_HALud wrote:dn68495

qweniden — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 09:43:27 -0400

sky_HALud wrote:

dn68495 wrote:

>you can use just JSP and thats pretty simple, but people who are doing that type of web-development

>1) would find Java more difficult than PHP

Why? What is the difference betwwen the plain JSP and PHP? Take existing taglibs for JSP - JSTL, Coldtags ( http://www.servletsuite.com/jsp.htm of course :) etc. and you can develop even faster than in JSP. Just see for example the Coldfusion world. They are more than alive with their simple approach

In my experience, even plain JSP pages are simpler to develop and maintain (without using an IDE) than those PHP based. If you add taglibs to your JSPs, you already get a far superior combination.

I agree that the taglibs are a much cleaner approach, but in the JSP-only model, any business logic will be implemented in Java itself and its just been my experience that hobbiest programmers feel more comfortable with PHP because it has so many accessible utility methods and you dont need to learn OO concepts. And thats not even talking about deployment. With PHP you just upload your files into a directory, with Java you have to know about WAR files, web.xml and JDBC and the like. For use who know this stuff inside and out, it seems simple, but for the non-proffessional hobbiest coder or someone who is more a "designer" than programmer, that stuff is a barrier to entry.

sky_HALud wrote:

PHP does also have its fair share of Web frameworks. One should rather compare Struts and Spring MVC against those.

Most PHP developement isnt MVC so the best apples to apples comparison is probabbly raw JSP to raw PHP.

Not bad, some of your links

sybrix — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 09:03:34 -0400

Not bad, some of your links aren't working, but it's not bad. I know it's good since it's 100MB to download. I'm going to download this and see if I can start a new javalobby that runs on java - seriously.

dn68495 wrote:>you can use

sky_HALud — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:58:39 -0400

dn68495 wrote:

>you can use just JSP and thats pretty simple, but people who are doing that type of web-development

>1) would find Java more difficult than PHP

In my experience, even plain JSP pages are simpler to develop and maintain (without using an IDE) than those PHP based. If you add taglibs to your JSPs, you already get a far superior combination.

PHP does also have its fair share of Web frameworks. One should rather compare Struts and Spring MVC against those.

maddcast wrote:I don't see

sky_HALud — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:48:51 -0400

maddcast wrote:

I don't see Liferay in the list of CMS. I think it's the best of its kind.

Konstantin, thanks for pointing this out. I updated the original post with some info about Liferay.

>you can use just JSP and

dn68495 — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 07:30:23 -0400

>you can use just JSP and thats pretty simple, but people who are doing that type of web-development

>1) would find Java more difficult than PHP

While I am obviously biased,

wezell — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 07:27:55 -0400

While I am obviously biased, I would argue that dotCMS (www.dotcms.org) is by far the best open source Java WEB content management solution available. It is really feature complete. And while documentation has been scarce - we are working on that - there is an active and engaged community behind it.

I don't see Liferay in the

maddcast — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 06:02:46 -0400

I don't see Liferay in the list of CMS. I think it's the best of its kind.