three cons of PHP?

[jiehuang001]

I tried to get a comparasion between PHP and JSP from a professor who taught both of them.

He told me that the Pro for PHP is that it is "tuned" for web programming so it is always easy to use and quick to find what you need.

However, he mentioned the following three cons for PHP also.

1. PHP is not object oriented.
   However, I do find a chapter named "classes and objects" in PHP manual. Is PHP beginning to be object oriented? Even though I know the concept of OOP is popular, my coding never benefited from it. What is the opposite term for "OOP"?
   In my understanding, in OOP, other people write some general classes, then you can import and use it through the provided interface, but you will not and do not need to see the source code. In the none-OOP world, if you want to use another class/function/method, you need to add/include the source code into your own code and modity to suit your need. Am I right?

2. PHP is intepreted, not compiled, therefore, slower than C, Java.
   What does "intepreted" exactly mean? For each request, the code is coverted from php language to machine language?

3. PHP is not scalable to enterprice level as Java does.
   Why this is the case?

I really love PHP and want to see evidence that it is strong.

Please comment.

Jie Huang

[jllydgnt]

PHP 5 has made a huge leap in the OO direction. Much more OO than PHP 4.

I believe the "opposite" of OOP is refered to as procedural programming.

[saronoff]

For the first point, PHP not being Object Oriented, he was correct. However, as another user mentioned in PHP5 many features that move PHP to a fully-OO language have been added. There are a few more features that would need to be added to make PHP as OO as JAVA and C++. (C on its own is NOT OO.)

However, the next 2 points I dispute completely. PHP can be used in large environments on the web. Large web applications using PHP and a database more able to handle large amounts of data (PostgreSQL, etc) make PHP usable in large environs. However, PHP is not a language like JAVA or C/C++ in that its not able to be used in creating stand alone applications that work like JAVA or C-based applications. However, PHP is a web-based language not meant to make these applications.

Also, it should be noted JAVA is not a compiled language. Its a run-time interpreted language from a middle language and can be slower then PHP for this reason. Basically, when you first compile your JAVA programs they become java byte code that a JAVA Virtual Machine programmed for each operating system can take and compile in to machine code for that operating system. Hopefully you follow all that but the point is JAVA is not compiled but interpreted.

As for a definition of an interpreted language, in a short and sweet form, it means the language is compiled at run time and not before. C/C++ are compiled then run. PHP is compiled and run in one step making the running of a program slower. However, mod_php, a programming running with most if not all PHP installation makes PHP run faster by optimizing code run over and over again.

[SOL-ion]

Is PHP beginning to be object oriented?

I have heard that PHP 5 will have a lot more support for OO development. Although I doubt very much that it will be fully OO like Java.

SOL

[DigitalExpl0it]

one reason I use PHP to night use the objects, look at ASP and all the com and object crap. doing this only lets asp work correctly on windows, yes ther eis asp for unix/linux but lets ay you want to do object or vbscript etc.. this will not work.

jsp, is actually slower than php from experiance. Java is just slow period 🙂