Cold Fusion, Zope, and ACS

[niall at kst.com (Niall Kavanagh)]

On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, Jesse Noller wrote:

> To quote a recent article:
>

What article? I question the author's knowledge of such matters, read
on...
 
> PHP. PHP has developed an especially strong following in the open source
> community, since both PHP and its preferred database (MySQL) are both now
> open source tools. It is used by a number of technical Web sites, including
> Slashdot. It can integrate with a wide array of databases, including some
> fairly esoteric Unix-based databases. And it has all the advantages of an
> open source tool: committed user base, ability to modify or extend the code,
> no licensing fees, and ports to many operating systems.
> 

Slashdot uses Perl (mod_perl) pretty exclusively. There are
"slashdot-like" systems written in PHP however.

> Unfortunately, PHP has two crucial problems: performance and database
> portability. The development team has done a remarkable job of improving the
> performance over the past two releases, but it is still slow in comparison
> to most of the other competing tools. More importantly, each database that
> PHP supports requires a separate set of commands and offers a different
> array of features, capabilities, and bugs. Migrating from MySQL to Oracle
> requires changing every line of database code and probably changing some of
> the PHP functions as well, depending on the features available in each
> database library. That's not even considering inherent differences between
> the databases themselves. PHP is fine, as long as you're going to run it
> with a single database, particularly PHP/MySQL. But its hard to use if
> you're building systems for a number of other people, or if you prototype in
> one database and deploy in another
> 

Database abstraction is one area where PHP suffers, though there are
libraries out there that will handle this for you, as well as a DBI-like
interface in the works from the core developers.

As to performance, I'm not sure where the author of this article gets his
data. There's certainly no problems there. I'd like to see some hard
numbers! I'm not familiar with Cold Fusion, but PHP is generally as fast
or faster than Perl or ASP/VBScript for most operations I've had to do.
Throw the Zend optimizer into the mix (http://www.zend.com) and it
screams.

> Coldfusion also has inherent failover capability, as well as clustering
> software, etc,etc.
> 

Nothing to stop PHP from failing over with Apache/IIS -- or Perl for that
matter -- since they're not "application servers".

> Personally? I see each as a seperate tool for seperate needs. PHP has too
> much in common with Perl for my taste. Not to mention. Coldfusion runs well
> under NT, as well as most flavors of Linux, soon BSD, as well as Solaris.
> 

;) Comes down to your needs, as always. Here's a little more info from the
PHP FAQ (http://www.php.net/FAQ.php), so take this with a grain of salt:

9.3. PHP vs. Cold Fusion? 
PHP is commonly said to be faster and more
efficient for complex programming tasks and trying out new
ideas. PHP is generally referred to as more stable
and less resource intensive as well. Cold Fusion has
better error handling, database abstraction and
date parsing although database abstraction is being
addressed in PHP 4. Another thing that is listed as
one of Cold Fusion's strengths is its excellent search
engine, but it has been mentioned that a search
engine is not something that should be included in a
web scripting language. PHP runs on almost every
platform there is; Cold Fusion is only available on
Win32, Solaris, Linux and HP/UX. Cold Fusion has a
better IDE and is generally easier to get started
with, whereas PHP initially requires more
programming knowledge. 

A great summary by Michael J Sheldon on this topic
has been posted to the PHP mailing list. A copy can
be found here:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=php3-general&m=95602167412542&w=1

9.4. PHP vs. Perl? 
The biggest advantage of PHP over Perl is that PHP
was designed for scripting for the web where Perl
was designed to do a lot more and can because of
this get very complicated. The flexibility /
complexity of Perl makes it easier to write code
that another author / coder has a hard time reading.
PHP has a less confusing and stricter format
without losing flexibility. PHP is easier to integrate into
existing HTML than Perl. PHP has pretty much all
the 'good' functionality of Perl; constructs, syntax and
so on, without making it as complicated as Perl can
be. Perl is a very tried and true language, it's been
around since the late eighties, but PHP is maturing
very quickly. 

--
Niall Kavanagh, niall at kst.com
News, articles, and resources for web professionals and developers:
http://www.kst.com
WARNING: I have switched from cigarettes to nicorette. I am cranky.

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