Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: [PHP-CVS] cvs: php4 / TODO From: Kristian Köhntopp (kk <email protected>)
Date: 10/13/00

Jim Jagielski wrote:
> There is that unfortunate mindset, that's repeated often: that
> PHP is only good for small and medium sites. PHP, and Java and JSP
> and just about anything you can think of, are tools, designed to
> do something, and do it well. Are there shortcoming in PHP? Sure.
> But I tend to believe that there are more in Java. The fact that
> a saw can cut, but a hammer can't, doesn't make the hammer a
> worthless tool ;)

That perception of PHP is in part a marketing problem, but marketing
needs buzzword compliance in order to become efficient in changing
that perception. That is, because behind this perception of PHP
are some very real limitations in the language and the platform,
which an appserver, stronger typing and a made-over object model
would cure.

Java too has some design stupidities, for example the lack of native
java compilers and the enormous memory requirements of JVMs. Java
was a bytecode driven language in order to be portable between
client machines and in order to implement Java security.

With java on a server, there is no need to be portable, and the
execution environment is controlled completely so there is little
to no need for JVM based security. The JVM has become completely
redundant. Instead, it would easily be possible to compile Java
into native machine code of the target platform, and have it
execute directly on the silicon. That would save the cost of the
JVM, and all the complexity involved in JIT, bytecode caching and
the like... Of course, PHP does not address this, either, as there
is not (and won't be?) a native PHP compiler or gcc/PHP integration
(and a stronger typed variant of PHP, so that this compiler can take
advantage of the type information).

> There are very few things intrinsic to Java/JSP that make it "better"
> suited to large, complex sites. One here's that it's "impossible
> to separate the business logic from the display logic" a lot. But
> what is it specifically, for example, in JSP that _does_ allow it?

As a side note regarding separation of content and layout, have a
look at the roxen platform.

Such a mechanism involving XML/XSLT with PHP callbacks, would be
really useful and a very powerful marketing point for PHP.
Basically, you would have a web server module which executes
stylesheets, not unlike mod_xslt as found as referenced by
http://www.gingerall.com/. PHP would be a really nice escape
mechanism on top of such an engine, where one could
overload/replace regular HTML/XML tags with calls to PHP functions,
giving these PHP functions access to attributes and content of
these tags. One could then for example write an overload for
<h1>-tags, replacing them with TTF rendered fonts.

Have a look at http://www.netuse.de, and right-click on any of
the headines. These headlines are set as normal <h1>/<h2> containers
in the source document, but the roxen engine has overloaded these
tags with a definition of our own:

<define container=h1>
 <p>
 <gtext split fg="#000033" bg="#ffffff"
        2 bold nfont=offensive><contents></gtext>
 <br>
</define>

This defines a new tag <h1>, which is being implemented as a
call to <gtext>, using the <contents> of the <h1> container.
The <gtext> tag is implemented as a callback into a programming
language, in the case of Roxen the pike language. It takes the
contents of this tag, and renders them as a TTF GIF, using the
fonts and attributes specified in the gtext. This definition of
<h1> is being kept in a stylesheet external to the document,
and is in fact configureable. Try http://www.netuse.de/index.html
and http://www.netuse.de/index.html?tmpl=netuse1.tmpl to see
the effect (will take a long time first time, as the result must
be rendered and is then cached automatically).

Merging XSLT and PHP, a similar thing could be possible with
PHP, enabling you to truly separate content and layout. Have a
look at the true source of that index.html:

<h1>Willkommen bei NetUSE </h1>

<news title="Microsoft senkt Preise für Windows 2000 Server"
      src="/news/microsoft/20000928.html">
<img src="/profil/partner/SPPLogo.gif" alt=""
     width=159 height=50 align=left>
Microsoft senkt im Zuge einer Vereinfachung des deutschen
Lizenzmodells im Zeitraum vom 01. September 2000 bis 31.
Dezember 2000 den Preis für das Netzwerkbetriebssystem
Microsoft Windows 2000 Server.
</news>

The <news> container is <define>ed as part of the template, and
will generate the result shown on http://www.netuse.de. Changes
to the index.html will be detected and re-rendered, then cached
automatically by the roxen webserver. This separates content
from layout just fine, and has an efficient and transparent
caching concept behind it, making it very, very fast.

Unfortunately (for roxen) there is little to no user base for
roxen, despite it being the superior server and having a really
nice concept. PHP has the user base, and could have the concept,
if XML/XSLT and PHP are merged properly.

Kristian 

-- 
Kristian Köhntopp, NetUSE AG Siemenswall, D-24107 Kiel
Tel: +49 431 386 436 00, Fax: +49 431 386 435 99
Using PHP3? See our web development library at http://phplib.netuse.de/

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