I guess I'm talking to get this off my chest. I guess I'm talking to
the newbies out there wondering if they want to remain on ASP.NET, C#,
JSP, or whatever, or whether they want to do their next project in
PHP.
Okay. I moved from Microsoft Windows 2000 and Visual Basic and ASP to
Linux and JSP. I plan to stay on Linux now. Let's just say that I did
it, but JSP was aggravating. I had to type 10 times more code than I
felt I had to, and the data types always got in my way. Often I would
have to write some code, fix it, recompile again, then test, find a
bug, go back, etc. -- the compilation step was aggravating and slowed
things down a great deal. I kept wanting a VB for Linux.
Then, I started working with PHP and MySQL because I felt it had
finally matured. To my surprise, besides the {} and ;, PHP pretty much
is the VB of Linux thanks to the raw speed of the Zend PHP4 engine, if
not the PHP5 one around the corner. With PHP, I don't have to worry
about data types, mess with the slow compilation step, have the pain
of adding the JDBC connector to JSP, and I can write 10 times less
code and still have pretty fast pages. And, since you can now compile
PHP, you can run even faster than JSP if you need to do so. To top
things off, PHP is soon going to have a cross-platform GTK+ windowing
engine so that one can make standalone apps or client/server form
apps.
When I say VB and ASP, I didn't mean VB.NET. I took a class in VB.NET
and had to write code in C# and ASP.NET. Microsoft made some things
easier, and some things were ten times harder. I found the XML/XSLT
library sucked and was incomplete compared to the old one. Plus, I
realized I was writing for an unstable, unsecure, proprietary platform
that is doing nothing but get more and more complex. I thought, if
Windows is going in the direction of complexity and lock-in, and Linux
and Java is doing a 180 on that, and things have matured with Linux
and Java, why don't I just make the move, wholesale, to Linux? And it
was done. At first I liked JSP just to be free from Microsoft, but I'm
very glad I finally moved to PHP, where I plan to stay.
RedHat 9 made Apache, PHP, and MySQL a snap to install -- using
nothing but 6 checkboxes on the Add/Remove Programs and inserting the
disks.
Right now, the buzz is all about MySQL and LAMP, but with PostgreSQL
starting to grow up, and because of MySQL's licensing changes, we all
might be moving to LAPP with PostgreSQL, remaining open source.
So, anyway, I'm thinking about writing a work order management system
/ CRM as either a PHP web app, or a PHP/MySQL (or PostgreSQL)
appliance. I plan to make an open source version, and then a
customized version that I can sell for cash. The appliance would be a
rackmount 2 drive hardware mirror, AMD proc., with tape drive. Yes, it
would be built on Linux. You would manage the appliance with a web
browser and it would do nothing but feed it the daily tapes, keep it
in a cool, dust-free environment, and give it a nice UPS.
So, newbies, if you are looking for the "VB" in Linux, look no further
than PHP. It has matured.
the newbies out there wondering if they want to remain on ASP.NET, C#,
JSP, or whatever, or whether they want to do their next project in
PHP.
Okay. I moved from Microsoft Windows 2000 and Visual Basic and ASP to
Linux and JSP. I plan to stay on Linux now. Let's just say that I did
it, but JSP was aggravating. I had to type 10 times more code than I
felt I had to, and the data types always got in my way. Often I would
have to write some code, fix it, recompile again, then test, find a
bug, go back, etc. -- the compilation step was aggravating and slowed
things down a great deal. I kept wanting a VB for Linux.
Then, I started working with PHP and MySQL because I felt it had
finally matured. To my surprise, besides the {} and ;, PHP pretty much
is the VB of Linux thanks to the raw speed of the Zend PHP4 engine, if
not the PHP5 one around the corner. With PHP, I don't have to worry
about data types, mess with the slow compilation step, have the pain
of adding the JDBC connector to JSP, and I can write 10 times less
code and still have pretty fast pages. And, since you can now compile
PHP, you can run even faster than JSP if you need to do so. To top
things off, PHP is soon going to have a cross-platform GTK+ windowing
engine so that one can make standalone apps or client/server form
apps.
When I say VB and ASP, I didn't mean VB.NET. I took a class in VB.NET
and had to write code in C# and ASP.NET. Microsoft made some things
easier, and some things were ten times harder. I found the XML/XSLT
library sucked and was incomplete compared to the old one. Plus, I
realized I was writing for an unstable, unsecure, proprietary platform
that is doing nothing but get more and more complex. I thought, if
Windows is going in the direction of complexity and lock-in, and Linux
and Java is doing a 180 on that, and things have matured with Linux
and Java, why don't I just make the move, wholesale, to Linux? And it
was done. At first I liked JSP just to be free from Microsoft, but I'm
very glad I finally moved to PHP, where I plan to stay.
RedHat 9 made Apache, PHP, and MySQL a snap to install -- using
nothing but 6 checkboxes on the Add/Remove Programs and inserting the
disks.
Right now, the buzz is all about MySQL and LAMP, but with PostgreSQL
starting to grow up, and because of MySQL's licensing changes, we all
might be moving to LAPP with PostgreSQL, remaining open source.
So, anyway, I'm thinking about writing a work order management system
/ CRM as either a PHP web app, or a PHP/MySQL (or PostgreSQL)
appliance. I plan to make an open source version, and then a
customized version that I can sell for cash. The appliance would be a
rackmount 2 drive hardware mirror, AMD proc., with tape drive. Yes, it
would be built on Linux. You would manage the appliance with a web
browser and it would do nothing but feed it the daily tapes, keep it
in a cool, dust-free environment, and give it a nice UPS.
So, newbies, if you are looking for the "VB" in Linux, look no further
than PHP. It has matured.
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