ZDnet review of PHP, ASP, CF, Tomcat

Anon

ZDnet has a review:

http://www.zdnet.com/enterprise/stories/linux/0,12249,2646052,00.html

PHP's score in brief:

"A" for performance. Best in the group. This is the only item covered by metrics in the review. The results were:

47 pages per second for PHP4 on RH7 Linux.
46 pages per second for PHP with optimizer. (!!)
43 pages per second for MS ASP on Win2K.
29 pages per second for Allaire Cold Fusion on Win2K.
13 pages per second for Tomcat Java Server Pages on Linux.

"A" for cost, naturally.

"B" for portability. Never explained.

"B" for API. ZDnet complains about lack of consistency across the PHP function libraries.

"C" for installation. Beats me why that is an issue; they tested this on RH Linux, and I thought it came pre-installed there. There are a lot of installation gripes on this board, but most seem to have to do with Windows.

"C" for cost in developer time. There are no metrics in the review to substantiate this.

"C" for back-end connectivity -- downgraded because there are separate APIs for each database. This is particularly stupid; there are portable DB libraries (and one is included with PHP4, putting the lie to ZDnet's claim that none is available). If few programmers use them, perhaps it is because databases have their quirks and people like to take advantage of those quirks. If you do least-common-denominator, you get least-common features. Duh.

"D" for tools. Apparently we have bred an entire generation of programmers who can't type and need some sort of drag-and-drop IDE to do their work. ZDnet also complains that "any organization doing clustering or failover with PHP is in largely uncharted waters." Some of us would argue that those issues are outside the scope of a Web scripting language. The comparison here is with a $5,000 package from Allaire that includes some clustering tools.

Anon

I agree. The B for portability is a joke as is the D for tools (vi works great even if it's php) and a C and C for developer time and back end connectivity is given without any reasons.

Tom

Anon

Right on, Steve!

I wonder where the writer of that article works, and excuse me for saying this, but only a drunk person would give CF a "B" in "backend connectivity" and a "C" to PHP, JSP and ASP. Apparently, his argument has to do with the lack of an integrated DB access interface..sigh

BTW, my feeling that this guy couldnt tell "web development" from his elbow is only re-inforced by a "C" ranking for PHP in "installation"!

On *NIX -- 15 minutes max. On windows, now you have PHPTriad (lookup www.sourceforge.net) kind of stuff which does the installation in under 2 minutes. Lets not even begin to compare that to Tomcat and what it has done to my hair...

Besides, they used QUEST software to test the performance and PHP performs fastest. We have tried e-Suite from RSW and LoadRunner from Mercury Interactive etc..diff tools give diff performance results of course, but PHP is always always always faster -- without all this tuning and load balancing jazz thrown in for a song.

The only cotton that "corporate dimwits" like the ZDNet journalist have these days to stuff into PHP's mouth is "Well, its not proven in enterprise environments". I hope that will change soon.

Cheers
</Shanx>

Anon

Thanks for the pointer, Steve! Say, you don't suppose that
there's any connection between potential ad revenue and
a possible bias here? Ohhh, sorry, don't know where that
cynic came from!

Anon

ZDnet is a joke, and that article is just further proof of it.

I mean they did make a few good points, like the lack of API consistency, which has confused me before. But the article is imbalanced (not unusual for a lot of stuff from ZDnet) and offers no depth on other important areas that they graded on.

Installation varies, but I can get PHP set up in 10 minutes on a fresh Apache install with PHP downloaded from php.net. I guess ZDnet's complaint was the lack of an "installer" to do all the easy stuff for you (and there are several installers available). The first time I did it, it probably took half an hour, but that was without reading the directions all the way through.

As for tools, a simple text editor with color syntax highlighting has done wonders for me. That's all I need 🙂

Anon

The crazy thing is, PHP supports ODBC quite well, so saying there's no good abstraction layer is just a lie. IF you want to, you can program right down to the metal via a native interface, you can use the DB abstraction layer, which is coming along nicely, you can go ODBC, or you can wait for the next generation of abstraction to come along.

The only connectivity Java has is JDBC, and the only connectivity Cold Fusion has is ODBC (well, I think they can do Fox Pro or some other simple database natively.)

So, because I have more ways to do it, that's bad?

The other remark, about a constantly changing API is also ridiculous. I've been using PHP since 3.0.x days, and all my old code runs fine. Nowadays, when I edit it, I sometimes cut out huge chunks that are now handled by a small function, but I can hardly fault PHP for having more, better, and useful functions being added all the time.

And I do find it interesting that so many people want to cluster in the web server software, instead of building a reverse proxy cache in front. A simple little Pentium Pro 200 with 128 Megs ram can cache a site well enough to make it out performan many large, heavily clustered Cold fusion sites.

Anon

These 3 points just prove ZDNet's bias.

Pros: The easiest to learn; mature; excellent development and administration tools.

Cons: Proprietary language; not suitable for back-end development.

Bottom Line: The one to pick for low-cost, quick Web development projects.

This is what they said about CF and yet they gave it the highest marks. How does that work? Plus knocking down PHP because of lack of enterprise level use, then proping up CF of which they state "not suitable for back-end development".

Who is this article for, a buch of HTML developers who are trying to be web programmers? I'm sorry but if you are confused by and if..then..else statement then you should stay out of the web programming business.

Anon

Rob wrote:

I'm sorry but if you are confused by an if..then..else statement then you should stay out of the web programming business.

Can I steal that for a tag line please? :⁾