Latest Happenings in the PHP World

The inimitable John Lim comments on a 2005 article, written by Amazon engineer Steve Yegge, that asks "Is weak typing strong enough?"? Steve's assertion is that scripting languages are useful until the moment multi-threading or high-performance enters the picture. At that point, he lobbies for compiled languages that provide ultimate control (e.g., C++). In other words, each has its place. John reinforces the message:

The key is not to argue about abandoning one for the other, but use the strengths of both. For core code where speed and threading is critical, use strongly typed compiled code. At the periphery, for user interface and rapidly changing business rules, use a dynamically typed language.

John also points us to an excellent pro-PHP rant from Harry Fuecks:

[For] PHP as an Apache module the two big things are it works and it’s scalable. More to the point no one really has an execution model to compare with it, except perhaps Microsoft with ASP 3.0, which they’ve since abandoned. Before you fly off the handle, think about this one... [it] is the interpreter returning to a fresh state after every request (no globals hanging around or otherwise). PHP really is shared nothing. You want scaling? Try [Wikipedia]...

Is anyone seriously questioning PHP's scalability these days? What, with SourceForge, the US Army website, and Yahoo's entire infrastructure? John sums it up with a great anecdote, which I'll paraphrase. If you know what you're doing, you can build the vast majority of your enterprise application -- no matter how large -- in PHP. Flickr's architecture is a great place to start.