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by Marc Logemann.
Original Post: what people ignore when talking about PHP....
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They always ignore the fact that maintaining a LA(M)P stack can become a nightmare very fast. So please, if you compare PHP with Java for instance, please also have a look at the deployment scenario. With Java you dont need to be a unix expert. You can simply rent an internet server at some hosting company, install latest JDK/JRE which is definitely a snap and there you go. With PHP its quite different. Most likely there is already a PHP version installed, depending on the server rollout config, this version can be out of date and then the fun starts.
I have an internet server located at 1&1 for quite some time with an installed PHP 4.x. Now i want to install a CRM system (vTiger) which relies on PHP 5.x I tried the most simple way by doing “rpm -U” but as always with RPM (the worst package manager on the planet) it failed because of packages relying on PHP 4.x. Then i discarded the RPM idea and went for the “compile the shit from source” solution. Attention: The average developer will have his first problems here because not everyone on the planet knows how to compile stuff on linux. Even if you know how to do it, you should be aware of the configure parameters of your old PHP binary, otherwise you will have a different kind of PHP animal running, breaking current programs relying on PHP and its modules.
To make it short, i have done all that and because i have done it in the past, its not that a big deal. Now i have a PHP5 shared object waiting to be inlcuded in the apache server. But wait… if i do so, all current programs will use PHP5. Hmmmm. Bad. So either you rename all your current php files to php4 or something and map the old php binary to the .php4 extension (which is a very bad idea because this will most likely break app code) or you have to trust in the upwards compatibilty of php. With java this a no brainer, you can isolate different java version quite well, with php you have to be a linux and apache admin.
But i am not at the end. My brand new php5 binary doesnt load php extensions (like the not so unimportant MySQL extension). This is quite scary because my php5 installation uses the php.ini file as the old php4 binary which was able to load php extensions. Remember, i am not a php newbie, i edited php.ini files 6 years ago and compiled more than one php binary.
And at this point i really dont care if php is faster to code within some areas, if i fiddle around with linux because of PHP for a single day, the minimal development effort gain is lost 4times. I am quite pleased that i never had to “compile” a java version by hand and look for a configure string which is 4x times longer than every java interpreter call (with all that VM parameters) can be. And yes, there are people who can handle all this with linux because they are quite good in linux/apache administration but keep in mind that i prefer knowledge in transaction semantics and java classloading than in linux administration.
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