John Anderson has posted some of his thoughts in a journey he was forced to travel by a school project - working with Java - from a PHP developer's perspective.

As you might be able to gather from my involvement with Cake, I've always been a pretty big fan of PHP for web development. For some reason, PHP gets a little bit of bad press, and I've always wondered why, because my own experience has been extremely positive. PHP is often cast in a light that shows it to be the language of 15 year old script kiddies, and smaller unmanageable websites. I've never seen it that way.

I'm finishing up my degree in Information Technology at BYU, and as part of that program, students must pass a year long capstone project course. On its face, the course feels like a mix of project management and organizational behavior, but underneath is a lot of project meetings, coding and politics. Our project is a web-based application, and the decision was made that the project be written in Java.

He looks at a few topics, explaining the difficulties/advantages that he found along the way. Topics he covers are:

• Object Usage
• Application Structure
• Database Interaction
• Error Reporting
• Scalability and Performance