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Postings from August 2001
On Wed, Aug 22, 2001 at 12:39:12PM +0100, Andy Wardley wrote: > Nathan Torkington, High Priest of the Slippery Lighter, wrote: > > Here are my reasons why the idea of using PHP on big projects scares > > me: > > Forgive me for slipping into marketing buzzwords, but I think > the most succint description of PHP's downfall is that it > doesn't support an "n-tier" model. It doesn't support 3-tier > and it doesn't even support 2-tier. > > [...] Forgive me if I don't fall into the trap of "Why I don't like X (where X != Perl)". :-) The web is a *big* place. No one tool/paradigm/approach/technique will solve all problems. So, while n-tier is preferable to a certain class of problems (perhaps the vast majority of problems to be solved on the web), there are legitimate (and frequently non-technical) reasons to choose 1-tier approaches. Perrin Harkins has a story on perl.com comparing the myriad templating systems available on CPAN. It's a very delicate subject, and I think he handled it very well: each has it's niche and which one you use depends on a variety of constraints, including scalability vs. performance vs. learnability vs. complexity. http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2001/08/21/templating.html I have no opinion for or against any aspect of PHP. However, it is undeniable that PHP is doing something well - it is a simple, robust, portable system for developing 1-tier web applications[*], and there is only one of it. That makes it much simpler to focus on, adopt, support, and write about. As long as there are 27 different 1-tier web toolkits on CPAN, they will mostly get lost in the noise while PHP usage increases. (Ditto for Cold Fusion and ASP to some degree). Z. *: Like it or not, 1-tier applications are going to be written. Deal with it as you like. Writing axkit/tt2 to support n-tier apps is probably the most productive way to deal with it. :-)Thread Previous | Thread Next