[thelist] PHP

At 13:20 2000-01-05 +1300, you wrote:

<SNIP>

>>What has stopped me from loving it is that it is an independant language. 
>>Languages like ASP are 80% established scripting language. PHP on the 
>>other hand... well... http://php.net/quickref.php3
>>That scared me enough.
>
>Hehe.  Yes, well.  The online manual does help a lot for navigating around 
>all those functions.  What I liked about PHP was that it was quick to pick 
>up since I know Perl and C++.  You guess a function, and it works.
>
>If you actually go looking for a function, you have to muck about in the 
>manual a little while..

Exactly - also a lot of those functions are basically copies of each of the 
database functions - eg. msql_query
and sybase_query and mysql_query all do pretty much the same thing for 
different databases...

... which brings me to

>Is there anything else that you *cant* do in PHP which you can with 
>straight CGI (Perl)?
>
>Ol.

In my humble opinion, it is much more difficult to write database code that 
is simply portable across different database engines. In Perl, one would 
probably use the DBI interface so that to change database is quite 
straightforward. As far as I have been able to work out (and there could be 
a workaround), PHP uses a whole bunch-o-different-functions (technical 
term!) to interface with different databases.

That said, it's what I've been using for my personal projects and I have to 
say that I love it - for much the same reasons as Oliver said - I just sat 
down and started programming it - very little learning curve for someone wo 
comes from a unix programming background. Especially if you have also 
programmed a fair amount of ASP and have a good understanding of how one 
templates that kind of script.

Oh - another drawback is that you can't select from around 10 trillion 
different reference books - as far as I understand, there are only 2 at the 
moment (possibly just the one - Core PHP Programming by Leon Atkinson, 
which is a pretty good start guide).

.steve





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