PHP

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Niall Kavanagh writes:
| On Wed, 13 Dec 2000, David Kramer wrote:
| > Actually, Niall, I have been talking to Jerry about possibly doing a
| > presentation on PHP at the February meeting.  Would you be interested in
| > collaborating on some level?  While I've done some fun projects in php,
| > there's a lot I haven't touched.
|
| I'd love to. What sort of topics would you like to cover? How technical of
| a presentation do folks want?

Well, I've played around with php a bit, and I've found that the main
problems are similar to the problems with java: How the @#$&^@#*^$ do
you debug the stuff?  What do you do when "It just doesn't work,  and
doesn't  even give me error messages"?  How do you get control of the
wild variations in the implementations?  How do  you  even  guarantee
that the code will be run when you expect?

Such problems can be real showstoppers.  Having a program that  works
just  fine  on my own workstation, but "doesn't work and doesn't give
any output at all" on a server machine is a real discouragment to any
further use.

This is the main reason that I tend to fall back on perl.  I know how
to  say "fatalsToBrowser" or create /tmp/cgi.log or whatever in perl,
so when it totally fails without any diagnostics, I  can  get  a  few
clues.  Java and php docs don't seem to much cover this sort of basic
mechanics; they just assume that everything  will  go  fine  and  you
won't have any problems.  And when they totally fail, often you can't
even find anything in the server's error log.

One of the most useful CGI scripts in my collection is at:
   http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/CGI/ae.cgi
and can be run as:
   http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/cgi/ae.cgi/path/info?some&arg1=val1&arg2=val2

I've been on the lookout for some time for  the  equivalent  of  this
useful sanity test in java, php, and various other languages.  I have
a javascript version, and apache comes with a sh equivalent,  but  it
seems to be difficult to learn how to do such basic things in most of
the other languages. Knowing about complex and sophisticated tools is
not of much use when such basic things fail silently.

(Well, OK; I could sit down and type  in  a  C  equivalent,  and  I'd
expect  it  to  work  the first time, but I haven't actually done it.
Maybe I should.  ;-)

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