I am taking an introduction to OOA/D, and this perhaps is one of the most useful courses I will be taking. I discussed PHP, ASP and JSP with my professor and what I was getting is that PHP is not scalable. I saw an example of this when a student took a popular PHP BBS and after creating 1900 forums on it, one for each subject in the university, whenever some demands the page multiple times (e.g. refresh 5 times) it crashes and returns that it cannot access the database.
I noticed that Artima uses JSP for their forums, is the source publicly available? This sounds like an interesting project for me to get a feel of a non-trivial project.
My question is, is PHP or Python a bad choice? And if done in Java I would have to use it with Apache Tomcat?
How well would a java forum support heavy load or is that restricted to the number of active threads (e.g. 50) set by Apache? Could anyone estimate the number of users and forums it could support?
I am sorry to be asking so many questions, but I have a limited amount of experience, anything anyone can tell me will be helpful.
PHP invites poor coding style and is mainly used by hobbyists and inexperienced people. That means that in general it will likely not be as well tested nor be designed as well nor be designed with high load in mind (as your experience shows).
There are several freely available Java based forum systems available as well as several commercial offerings. To give an indication of scalability, Sun and Novell (among others) use JSP based forum software for their user communities. These forums support tens of thousands of users at least, on the Sun user community there are generally several thousand people connected at any time and several hundred distinct posting categories/forums for them to read and post in.
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