PHP: Where does wind and rain want to route?

PHP4: Behind the Miracle

In 1995, Rasmus was writing his personal homepage in PHP; today, PHP has become the world's most popular scripting language, more and more sites choose to use PHP, even Yahoo has abandoned its own script and use PHP to support its web site. It can be said that PHP is a miracle. I always thought that there was a reason behind any miracle. Now, let's look at the success of PHP through this miracle.

1 Easy to use

PHP's entry threshold is low, and its requirements for users are minimal. People who have studied C have little time to use PHP. Their syntax is so similar that I often wonder if it is possible to change to PHP by adding a $ before the C variable. This allows a large number of C programmers to select PHP in a network script. In addition, PHP's Library of functions is much more studious than the ASP's component system and Java's vast library of classes. In the programming style, PHP is more free, you can use n style to write your script program. These features make PHP a preferred language for beginners. It is an important strategy to preempt the beginner market. As anyone will remember their first love, people tend to have a deep affection for the language they originally studied. Even if you grow up later, switch to another language, you will always remember the language of the first learning. At this point, PHP is doing a great job.

2 Cut properly

The PHP development team is a group of people who know the most about the network, and they know exactly what the user wants. PHP is to do a good network scripting language, and it is just to do a network scripting language. The set of functions provided by PHP is quite powerful on the Web, and focuses on network applications. Such features as non-component file uploads in PHP, hyper-database support, and so on. By the way, PHP even supports Access databases. Focus makes PHP a great performance on the Web. There is a loss to win.

3 Strong Support

PHP has a strong opensource community support, with tens of thousands of open source code on the Web. You can integrate several existing programs to implement your application, or you can analyze master-level code to get improved. PHP also has many extensibility projects to enhance PHP's functionality in some areas. Like Pear, which focuses on programming normalization and Code reuse, it provides smarty that compiles template technology, and even develops GTK for desktop programs.

After analyzing these reasons, we can see that the success of PHP has benefited from the strategic vision of the PHP development team. PHP provides a minimal working set that enables users to efficiently accomplish their own applications in the simplest way possible. That's what beginners need. It then provides a convenient extension to all aspects of the solution, so that you only need to learn the area you want to use in the field of things. When you are involved in more and more of the field, your level is also improved, when you are familiar with most areas, look back, you will find unknowingly already to the mountainside. PHP also provides us with a learning attitude.

ASP.NET+J2EE: Wind and rain to come

The wave of innovation in the network scripting World was first initiated by Microsoft's ASP. In ASP. NET, there is an attractive thing--event-driven mechanism. This is a common concept in desktop programming, and event-driven programming in scripting means encapsulating server-side scripts (such as PHP, JSP, ASP) and client scripts (such as JavaScript and VBScript) to work together. As a result, programming becomes extremely convenient. Event-driven in a. NET environment also has the advantage that you can not even have any server-side scripts and client-script, because in ASP. C, you can use the language directly--not even $. This paves the way for traditional programmers in the MS Camp to turn to web development, while also making PHP a big hit on the beginner's market. Predictably, the future of traditional programmers to PHP will be greatly reduced. But the biggest problem with ASP is that it can only run on Windows, and now the continent is making great efforts to develop Linux. This makes PHP's living space seem a bit wider, but--let's take a look at Java.

Java is also a miracle, 1995 released the first version, now formed three versions, covering the embedded system (J2ME) Desktop Program (J2SE) and Server (Java) three major applications. More importantly, Java has been recognized by the vast majority of programmers, and now the world's Most outstanding computer books are in C + + or Java as the description language. Java is almost as much a belief as C. So, let's not be paranoid that programmers in the Java camp will turn to PHP. At the same time, in front of the same open source and cross-platform Java, PHP lost a lot of advantages. The JSP in the Java EE also caused considerable pressure on PHP in the beginner market.

In the past to make PHP successful beginners market, ease of use and open source support and other aspects are challenged, and with the continuous improvement of machine performance, the demand for efficiency gradually reduced, it can be said that PHP to live and grow in the slit of ASP. NET and Java EE is a very difficult thing.

and PHP itself has a lot of problems. Too many people like low-level users. A large number of developers are in the introductory phase, not knowing how to improve themselves, resulting in a lot of open source code and inefficient, and then the next batch of beginners learn from these bad code, so recursive. On the other hand, higher-order users have to move to other languages to develop large-scale applications because of the incomplete object-oriented nature of PHP.

PHP5: Thick Coffee flavor

The PHP development team released the PHP5 BETA1 in the middle of this year, and we can see the counterattack from PHP. First of all, the development of PHP4 is still nonstop, and we can be sure that the development of PHP4 will continue for a long time. The purpose of this is to consolidate existing users while gradually merging some of the new features of the PHP5 in a future PHP4 release to achieve a smooth transition PHP4 to PHP5.

Then look at the changes in PHP5. In PHP5, we see too many shadows of Java. OO system is almost copy of Java, which ensures that the high-level users of PHP do not churn, so that they can easily use the latest technology system to structure their own applications. On the other hand, it is also convenient for Java programmers to use PHP, although this may be less of a scenario. After perfecting the OO system, PHP has the ability to truly enter the enterprise-class market. Then PHP5 also added a lot of his own stuff, like __get, to make this system easier to use. What I don't know is, will this cup of cappuccino be as popular as Java?

From the change of PHP5, we see the future direction of PHP. One is to compete with JSP, try to replace JSP in some respects, become glue of JavaBeans and servlet. This requires a closer relationship between PHP and Java. The Zend team is participating in the designation of the JSR specification. This specification will allow you to make a new Java object and invoke its method directly in PHP. This also allows PHP to enter the enterprise market faster. In addition, PHP will have a much better outlook if the scripts written by PHP can be compiled directly into binary code to run on the JVM. The other direction is integration between Java and. NET, which integrates existing resources in a number of large applications. PHP4 we can already invoke COM components and Java objects, we believe that in the future PHP5 will provide more support for this.

In any case, whether it is with the Java EE and. NET competition or integration, PHP to go, will be a road full of thorns. But since PHP has gone all the way to the present day, what reason do we not believe it can go farther?

Best Wishes, PHP.

PS This is just easy on the future development of PHP a little personal views, may not be very mature, just for a little reference.

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