[bens1901]

It seems that PHP is pretty popular these days. I've got a question: is PHP and mySQL capable of being used by a large company for their Production e-Commerce site? I've seen that Yahoo!Finance uses mySQL, and so do a few other really big commercial services. How about PHP? Is PHP ready for the enterprise market in regards to: security issues, load handling, reliability, etc. ?

I look forward to hearing comments. If you say "yes", then please mention an article or two that prove your point. I'm looking for evidence that I can use to convince a manager to use PHP & mySQL for a new site.

Thanks.

-Ben

[Simon Mundy]

Here's a start...

and here's an interesting read as well!

[Arkham_c]

Certainly PHP can scale to the needs of all but the busiest web sites. I woudn't use it on CNN.com, but for most companies it will scale.

PHP is like Perl. It's quick to develop, but tedious to maintain once it gets large. I think for small to medium-sized solutions it's a good choice, but I think for large solutions you need to bite the bullet and use java. Java is slower to develop than PHP, but it scales much better.

Java with servlets and/or jsp is developmentally similar to PHP -- the learning curve is not much different. For small to medium-sized projects, this is a great technology and can scale quite a bit for most needs.

Java with J2EE has a steeper learning curve than PHP, but it offers essentially unlimited scalability (for a price -- WebLogic and JBoss are hard to set up in a cluster without some experienced help). When your server gets slow, add a new one, and add it to the cluster. The cluster manager software automatically installs your app in the new container and deploys it.

[Simon Mundy]

Can you define what you mean by 'scalability'? Is it the amount of information you want to work with, or the amount of users who need to use your services, or the methods by which an application is deployed.

I'm certainly a complete ignoramus when it comes to JSP, but I'd like to at least get some basic knowledge of it so I can make more informed decisions.

[DeathMan]

Originally posted by Arkham_c:
Certainly PHP can scale to the needs of all but the busiest web sites. I woudn't use it on CNN.com, but for most companies it will scale.

PHP is like Perl. It's quick to develop, but tedious to maintain once it gets large. I think for small to medium-sized solutions it's a good choice, but I think for large solutions you need to bite the bullet and use java. Java is slower to develop than PHP, but it scales much better.

Java with servlets and/or jsp is developmentally similar to PHP -- the learning curve is not much different. For small to medium-sized projects, this is a great technology and can scale quite a bit for most needs.

Java with J2EE has a steeper learning curve than PHP, but it offers essentially unlimited scalability (for a price -- WebLogic and JBoss are hard to set up in a cluster without some experienced help). When your server gets slow, add a new one, and add it to the cluster. The cluster manager software automatically installs your app in the new container and deploys it.

I could swear I read that exact quote in the article posted above. Maybe I'm deja vuing.

[macvillage.net]

I think that PHP and mySQL can definately handle a production environment.

It's more due to the fact that PHP only recently matured... and the dot com bubble exploded that it hasn't been used so much... not much cash to be recoding in php. Better uses for the money right now, like paying for power in the office.

I personally think PHP and mySQL can handle quite a bit. It integrates very well with a mySQL backend... which is very scalable. Proven for years.

The PHP frontend, as long as it's mirrored across servers can handle infinate traffic. If your data is in the mySQL backend... by definition it's all over the system then.

And that's a very primitive way of handling things..

[MadBrowser]

I would say that if you have to ask... Then PHP/MySQL should be fine for you...

[Arkham_c]

PHP and MySQL are two completely separate issues. For all but the busiest sites, MySQL or PostgreSQL are perfect for the database backend. But you can use the database backends with PHP, Java, Perl, or Python.

So the real question here is, is PHP the right solution for your site? Personally, I would use PHP to hack together a prototype, java servlets for developing most sites, and J2EE only for sites that need distributed objects (J2EE makes using objects across different servers transparent using RMI/IIOP and CORBA).

PHP is like Perl in that you can hack something together very quickly, but it tends to result in sites that are "hacked" rather than "engineered". Just like Perl, you can write good, portable PHP code, but generally it doesn't happen.

Java enforces certain constraints that really lend themselves to object-oriented designs. I think that one of the easiest, fastest ways to develop a site is to use MySQL, Tomcat 4, and Velocity templates. The templating language is simple, you end up with a nice Model-Controller-View design that keeps business logic separate from presentation, and the application can scale and move between platforms with no code changes.