PHP scales. There, I said it.
Thursday, January 31st, 2008
…well, actually, I didn’t say it, a website about Java said it!
“PHP scales. There, I said it. The word on the street is that “Java scales and PHP doesn’t.” The word on the street is wrong, and PHP needs someone to stand up and tell the truth: that it does scale.“
We occasionally have to justify to clients why we choose to develop applications in PHP, so I thought I’d blog about it here.
A recent article on CIO.com slating the PHP programming language for security, scalability and performance has sparked a frenzy in the PHP community prompting lots of comments arguing to the contrary.
The author’s uninformed conclusion is sadly typical of a lot people in the industry, who’ve heard from their mate in the banking world, that if you want secure, high performance scalable web apps, you’ve got to go with Java.
This is simply not the case, and here’s why:
- A highly skilled development team is much more important than your choice of language. Sloppy programming can cause security issues? This is true of any language.
- A poorly designed system is, a poorly designed system - regardless of what technologies were selected for implementation. Poor implementation will cause any project to have problems regardless of size. To blame a language for poor decisions or bad practices is just silly.
- PHP has come a long way, and with the right developer PHP can be as powerful, scalable and reliable as any other language.
- Yahoo, Facebook, Wikipedia, Technorati, Digg, Flickr, Friendster and countless other extremely high traffic websites are powered by PHP.
- PHP allows applications to be developed far quicker than Java.