In a new post today, Jonathan Snook takes a look at two of the more popular PHP frameworks (CodeIgniter and CakePHP), comparing and contrasting what it's like to work with each.

I almost fear putting this kind of post together as it's bound to pull the fanatics (in the negative sense of the word) out of the woodworks. Right off the bat, let me just say that I've tried to be as fair and honest in this assessment and I've tried to keep it just to the facts while interjecting what my preferences are.

I'm pitting these two frameworks against each other but there really isn't a clear winner. Each has its strengths and weaknesses and ultimately falls to what your preference for certain features might be.

He starts with the "why?" of it all before even getting into the code examples. When he does, it's all about models, views, the out-of-the-box features, auto-loading, and documentation. As he mentioned before he started, though, there's not a "winner" in this comparison. His personal choice, though, is CakePHP for simplicity's sake.

On his blog today, Alexander Netkachev illustrates a concept behind the "different thought" frameworks like the Zend Framework spin on the idea of web applications.

Web site developers are familiar with a concept that a site consists of pages but Zend Framework proposes Controller/Action idea. Undoubtedly, Controller/Action is cool but how is it relevant to real world tasks? In other words, how is Controller/Action connected to the standard form flow?

His diagram shows the typical flow of an application and, below it, a sample PHP page that would handle the form results for such a layout. His question is what the Controller/Action method has over this typical format, and whether or not it just serves to make things more complex.

Getting a bit tired of those out there talking bad about PHP and comparing it to other languages, Kevin Schroeder decided to gather all of their complaints in one place and address them one by one.

Being a new Zender I've spent some time in the recent past looking at people's opinions about PHP now that it directly affects the work I do. In my research I have found a lot of interesting "opinions" about PHP vs. this that and the other thing, usually in the form of lists. "4 reasons why Java will outlast PHP", for example.

He lists five different things (like lacking features, slowness, and no serious applications written in it) and debunks each of them with facts, eliminating the FUD that has gathered around the topic.

Well, it's been a while since we've seen a "PHP versus whatever" kind of article around here, so I couldn't resist posting this look from Market Day comparing ASP.net and our beloved PHP.

The goal of this article is to provide some perspective on reasons why one might choose one over the other.

Unfortunately, it doen't really do anything of the sort. The article only serves to describe the two options - features, history, tools needed to use then - without ever giving any real reasons or situations where you might want to use one over the other. Their only real opinion on comparing the two is the "cost of the initial investment" or "comfort with using Open Source software".

Is anyone else out there as tired of these articles as I am?

Responding to this commentary from the SitePoint PHP Blog the other day, Jonnay has come up with some of his own thoughts on each of the topics mentioned.

Apparently there was some kind of PHP vs. Javascript fight, to see which language sucked the most. The results? Amazingly Banal, if not downright wrong.

Topics in each round of the fight included:

• Syntax
• Standard Libraries
• Meta Programming
• Error Handling
• Garbage Collection

Jonnay comes back with his (differing) perspectives on a few of the items - syntax, scope/namespaces/packaging, meta programming, AOP, and an overall commentary in which he reminds readers that defending either side isn't easy when the voting audience might not fully understand one language or the other.

In the ever-raging PHP versus Java debate, there's no shortage of opinions to go around. Included in these thoughts is a new post from Julian with one of the more rational comparisons I've seen in a while.

In summary: a killer app in PHP will always sway me. But my recent hands-on experience with test-driven development has really underscored how essential it is to have good Agile development tool support.

He starts with PHP5, listing out the pros (performance, large community) and the cons (easy to write bad code, huge number of frameworks). Next up is Java - giving it the same treatment - the pros (rigorous typing, leads 'enterprise' tools) and the cons (behind the curve on tests, develpment timeframe slower).

There are several other he lists for each of of pros/cons mentioned above, so check out the full list in his post.

From ThePHPGrind.net today, there's a new post with some opinions on the real differences between PHP4 and PHP5, including suggetions to just make the jump to the latest version.

I am repeated aggravated by so called "reputable" people in the PHP industry marginalizing and downplaying PHP5 in favor of the ever aging and antiquated PHP4.

And, I'm not talking about small applications. I'm talking about a complete online fantasy sports systems. Content and product management, e-commerce, integration systems and many custom modules for very large companies in the construction and industrial manufacturing industries. Company names that your kids probably know, but names that probably shouldn't be mentioned in my little rant here out of respect.

He makes the case that not only is it a pretty simple matter to make the move (usually) plus the fact that several large companies using PHP have already made the leap as well. I also like this great little "soundbite" quote he shares:

PHP5 is here already, and many of its' versions are completely stable for the vast majority of people. And, soon PHP6 will be here whether other people like it or not. So, why not get ready?

Wez Furlong posts today about a response made to a previous mention of "PHP vs. ASP.NET" in this article from Joe Stagner in this post on his MSDN blog.

From Wez:

Joe's response is perhaps a little pro-Microsoft (you can't really blame him for that--he does work there :-) but the essence of his response rings true; there's nowhere near enough factual data in the OTN article to make a balanced decision one way or the other.

To be fair to Sean (the author of the OTN article), it does say "Opinion" across the top of the page and the byline is "One developer's view of the pros and cons of the two most popular means of building web applications", but it's easy to forget those once you're into the article.

Wez also mentions one of his personal views on the whole debate, basically saying that even if PHP is the faster/more efficient, some situations might do better with an ASP.NET solution (what's the cost of implementation?).

Justin Silverton has posted a comparison between PHP and Perl, with the first part coming more from the PHP side comparing it to Perl and the second the opposite.

He starts off with some of the differences between the two langauges, including that PHP was made for the web, Perl was not and that PHP scripts take less overhead for the web server to run that Perl scripts as CGIs. There are also four larger topics that he looks at:

• PHP has separate functions for case insensitive operations
• PHP has inconsistent function naming
• PHP has no lexical scope
• PHP has too many functions in the main namespace

All but the top item (that one could be argued either way) are reasons that a Perl user might cite against using PHP. For each of the items, there's a bit of description following to give you a better idea where they're coming from.

As an "early adopter" of PHP6, Michael Bommarito has worked up some benchmarks he performed comparing PHP 5.1.3RC2-dev against the latest (at the time of writing) PHP 6.0.0-dev snapshots.

I've carried this PHP6 benchmark series on with Drupal, phpBB, and MediaWiki. The results seem to agree that performance is near-identical, and, given applications written for PHP6's native Unicode, would likely lean in favor of PHP6.

He describes the specs of the system he used ot test it and links to the software he used. His tests (56 of them) ran, measuring response times of the functionality in seconds. The end result was a bit surprising - PHP 5.1.3RC3 came out on top, but not by too much. He's not surprised by the results, however, noting that a lot of the slowness in PHP6 is being cuase by its string handling methods. PHP6 is slowly gaining on the 5.1.x series, and:

My overall instinct is that if a benchmark were written to fairly compare the two (i.e. mbstring vs native Unicode, instanceof over is_X), the results would be even more favorable for PHP6.