Blogs

I’ve been an on-again, off-again fan of PHP over the years. On the balance I AM a fan, but some things about it really grind my gears.

• Upgrading. Upgrading is always a nightmare. Things never really work out right away. Always budget like 2 hours to upgrade PHP, especially if you are using IIS or MySQL. Expect to trawl the forums if you are a new or intermediate user.
• Bugs. I’m tired of the shoddy Q/A that seems to go into production PHP releases. Its issues like this that waste time and make me wonder why I bother (Check out the recommended solution: downgrade to 5.x.x).
• Reinventing the wheel. I have to use a lot of scripting frameworks in my line of work (Ruby, .NET, JavaScript, ActionScript, ASP, PHP, JSP, etc etc). What strikes me is that a lot of the frameworks do a lot of things the same way, like the order of arguments for common functions like strlen, strpos, etc. Except php! Its always different with PHP.. it always seems to be some different convention that nobody else uses – go figure.
• Inconsistent API. I know PHP has been a work in progress, but there have been plenty of opportunities to standardize naming conventions. Eg: String replace versus string position (str_ireplace, stripos).
• Colloquial documentation. I sincerely hope you are a native north american english speaker when reading PHP docs. Actually, stripos is a great example of what I’m talking about – check out the argument names:

  int stripos ( string $haystack, string $needle [, int $offset] )

  Really cute, not very helpful.

I’ve been doing a lot of Ruby coding lately and I REALLY like a lot about that language.. especially how everything in Ruby is an object. I really wish PHP would adopt some of the lexicon of Ruby, or at least head in that direction. Also.. a console for testing out code would help development substantially (a la ‘ruby script/console’).

So Ektron and SitePoint recently published the results of a survey indicating that PHP developers report they are far more likely to switch to Rails than any other framework (ASP.NET, Java, Perl, Coldfusion, Classic ASP, and Python included). I’m not all that surprised. PHP is part of LAMP, and Rails also quite complementary to that technology stack.

(taken from http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2006/10/09/php-developers-most-likely-to-switch-to-rails/)

I think too that there are cultural (if you will..) reasons why this might happen. I have found the PHP community to be quite aligned with open source and free software, and generally interested in new and bleeding-edge technology. Also, Rails guys and PHP guys dress the same and use Pechule Oil (ok jokes!). Rails still suffers from some of the same issues that PHP has.. eg: Unicode support (actually rails is worse).. and one thing that PHP developers will lose when moving to rails is access to the Windows API (should they want to port ASP.NET apps or something).

PHP Developers willing to stay the course will be treated to some exciting improvements and cleanup in PHP 6.. including full Unicode support (already mentioned), and an improved SOAP interface.