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I am looking forward to PHP6!

I liked PHP 4. I use it on my own site but all the companies I have worked for (financial, banking) in the U.S. use Java based frameworks. I always liked the ease of stringing together PHP code. I once brought it up at a meeting and was was shot down with "it doesn't scale well, security holes, lacks JIT for our Solaris servers." It amazed me how well entrenched Java is in U.S. financial companies. Perhaps PHP 6 will offer an alternative to enterprise Java use.

A common myth used by people who don't understand what scaleability IS.


The number of system level security issues is low - 99.99% of all 'security holes' in php applications come because the person writing the code had no clue what they were doing. (see Wordpress, it won a pwnie for a reason)


Because spending time compiling on every execution is SO efficient - especially with the piss poor caching model that often lets php applications run FASTER if your userbase repeatedly sends the same requests.


It is suprising given that everything you just said they listed as problems with PHP generally go double for Java (I don't trust Java as far as I could throw Caliph Singh - AKA "The Great Khali") But you have to look at it's strengths.

Though for financial I can see a good reason - Java excels at serving multiple UNIQUE calls back to back. If the number of times users call up data in a row is calling up different data and results, Java will win. Financial institutions rarely run the same queries over and over again - one persons financial accounts, a single running total for just one section, etc, etc.

PHP with the SQL of your choice is at the strongest when you keep serving the SAME data over and over again where caching models can really make a difference. Take a forums where 90%+ of your visitors are going to be reading and re-reading the same posts. This will often hit the cache (especially if you ad a secondary cache like eAccellerator, Memcached, Zend Accellerator) for the output/results instead of running code, resulting in faster throughput.

Basically it's part of why you see a lot of forums and websites done in PHP, and few if any done in Java.

Though it would help explain why Banking websites get down on their knees in front of the donkey - because if they're java back-ended it's unlikely they even know what HTML is, much less good programming practices.

Edited 2008-08-12 08:40 UTC

As long as you don't use the old session functions or the long depreciated superglobals, transitioning the vast majority of code (average sites and functions) from PHP 4 to 5 is trivial, in my experience.