The PHP scalability saga continues
Jeff has a nice recap of this whole discussion. Altough it’s probably not over yet. I will now head over to the Java blogs to see what their take on all this is (it’s not a real discussion if you only hear one side right).
If you are wondering why i find this discussion interesting… I used to work at a company employing Perl, ASP, PHP & Java/JSP people and the Java people were by far the most ‘vocal’ about their language. So i naturally adopted a lot of their ideas about good programming practices. I used to program a bit of JSP too but have since moved to another company fully embracing PHP as my main language. It’s nice to see some of the arguments for using either language fully explored after having some doubts on the correct use of Java (and PHP) myself.
All in all not much has changed though, i remember having to explain to a sales consultant when he should push for Java and when for PHP as the correct tool for the job and ending up saying something like ‘if they want (can afford) complexity, sell them Java. If they simply want a database driven website sell them PHP/ASP’. This probably still goes for lots of large IT shops. And it’s not just a technological discussion, but also a psychological one. Some IT-managers will simply not be content spending only 80k euro on their shiny new CMS driven website, they -have to- spend at least 500k on complexity.