I consider PHP5 a total failure. It couldn’t get adopted in all this time and it was released what, in 2003? I really hope PHP6 gets more adoption since people won’t be able to rely on PHP4 forever.
I am a php coder & SEO but earn very little from php coding !
I thing SEO gives me more !
I see lots of generalizations…
Yes, it’s a generalization. That’s why I used the term ‘normally’. Not every PHP developer works in the ‘4 companies’ that you refer to. and they are not the only companies who are using PHP. For every critical application that is written in PHP there are at least a dozen which are not so critical or even amateurish.
When you are writing a long PHP form (possibly for a visitor survey or fairly unique registration) from scratch and you have to run a wide range of test cases against it, it does take hours. Even coming up with all the test cases and documenting them would take an hour or two. At least, that is what it takes me.
Yeah, I’ve had some forms that take hours to code. While a lot of this is taken up with coding the form in HTML and styling it in CSS, just coding all the validation takes awhile. Then the testing takes awhile as you test each portion.
That’s the PHP devs own fault. They could have made it trivially easy to run the PHP4 and PHP5 Apache modules side by side, but they chose not to, so most hosts stuck with PHP4 as it worked and was what people were used to. There are still scripts/apps out there that don’t play nice with PHP5 - Zen Cart being one that comes to mind and often needs fixing to work properly.
As for large sites using PHP - Generally speaking they use PHP for the view, but not for the business logic behind the site, that’s usually C or C++. PHP is basically jsut used as a templating system.
Quite a number of large websites run on PHP, and they use it for more than a templating system.
It is not that difficult to run PHP4 and PHP5 together. My host does it, and they have for quite some time. I wish though that they would make PHP5 default and PHP4 secondary.
Yes, they can be run together, but it usually means one of them has to be run in a sub-optimal fashion - unless you recode the SAPI for one of them slightly, so that you can use two different handlers to distinguish them, which means messing around each time you want to upgrade.
The largest websites, aren’t going to use PHP exclusively, it just can’t match the flexability of C/C++ on the backend, nor the speed, but it is ideal for a frontend to them.
No, i don’t think so
Why do you need to run so many test cases on it? Personally I just preg_match any input, then I know only exactly what I want can get through.
The only facts here were those which stated more financially stable companies relying on Microsoft or Sun technologies. Rest, the blabbing about PHP flaws is going to be plain, blasphemy (IMO, no offense).
Yeah, it’s true even the higher paying PHP jobs are less than their .NET or Java equivalents. But most of us won’t give up on something we love to do for few extra bucks, that’s the point.
I did. C#.NET day job, PHP for my own sites at night.
Its all about who you know. Network your way into a higher paying job or start your own company. It all comes down to balance sheets and how much the company can afford to pay you. The CIO helps to decided what technology is best for the company. Times are changing and new CIO are getting smarter. Old school guys will catch on soon.
Why do you need to run so many test cases on it?
Because I prefer to give more descriptive error messages to the end users (or log them in a file). Not only do I need to find out if an input was invalid, but also why it was invalid.
Yes, becoz, so many ready made scripts including open source are available on the net.
Facebook runs on much more than PHP. They’ve got all kinds of stuff running in the backend.
I have to disagree with those that say statically type languages take more knowledge. PHP is harder to work with and takes far more creativity to come up with good solutions. In Java and . NET and the like the solutions are fixed and built in. Programmers go looking for these built-in features and very seldom do they find that can not use them.
I can count 20 times that I have had to take a university student or a long time C++ programmer and have to explain to them that they now actually have to think about what they are building. They can no longer jump in start programming and find there way out of a fix by letting the language do the work.
That being said PHP programmers are just now getting proper saleries because PHP has now become the recognized replacement for ASP and other web languages. It was considered to be a hobby language before so the saleries were not there. I wrote about this in my new years blog. 2007 will be the year that PHP programmers come into the corporate light and become an important part of any development team.
I think there are lots of PHP developers that make top dollar. Finding a true php expert is not easy, especially one with a track record of success. They are out there, but there many others who are “ok” to “pretty good”. In languages like Java, generally people went to school (vs. self taught), and there are fewer in the “ok” to “good” range.
Well I was talking to someone recently who was at lecture by some business / it guy talking about web technologies. He was talking a lot about Java and .NET praising them and such how they were awesome for big business. Now someone asked why PHP was not mentioned and named some sites that do use it and the guy told everyone PHP was made by HP and no big business wants to depend on HP.
So mostly small guys want to run PHP not anyone big because PHP is made by HP or it’s security is not great or some crazy reason. So I salaries will reflect that since a little guy will not pay top dollar for a developer no matter what the language is.
Made by HP? Can you show us where it says that?
As a person who develops with C# and PHP (and some historic Java) I can quite categorically say… no.
PHP is not harder to work with - which is one reason why I still like it - Its great for website prototyping…