A few months ago I was doing some job hunting and i’ve come across some interesting job interviews in the process. Now I have a good mixture of full-time work and freelance work, and most of my freelance work consists of enterprise PHP web applications; while my full-time work primarily consists of J2EE and Oracle.
During the course of the interview when they are finished asking me the standard questions regarding my J2EE and Oracle experience, they focused their attention on my freelance works. I must say there is a really big ignorance with the LAMP stack in the enterprise world, opinions and questions that PHP is only a toy language and it cannot “scale” like their “100 concurrent users or the app server will choke” J2EE apps. Now this opinions are nothing new, but it’s hilarious when you actually meet people with that opinion. If only they knew that sites like Digg, Facebook, Friendster were constructed with PHP albeit the web-part only, but like they say, right tools for the right job. I cringe everytime people construct simple intranet sites with full blown J2EE architecture thinking it would automatically scale because it’s Java/Oracle; apps that could have been simply done with a LAMP stack and 1 week.
I’m primarily a Java developer but I’ve done some PHP in the past and I’m working on a project right now, in PHP (only for the back-end, the front-end is in Flex), for a small startup.
And my opinion is that the technology you’re using may not determine the scalability and overall quality of your application, since you can really do crap with any technology if you don’t understand it well enough. But the truth is that there are technologies with which it’s much easier to do crap than with others, and PHP is definitely one of these for me. Typing in particular is a real problem.
@Sebastien Arbogast
True! I’ve seen crap on both sides, but personally for small data-centric intranet apps I think it would be best to use scripting languages. Companies still insists on using large java-based frameworks for even the smallest apps.
I feel ya.
I’m in the same boat J2EE at work, PHP on the side. Although I’m looking for Ruby jobs right now.
Java only people subscribe to doctrine.
Save an object to a database with Struts/EJB:
JSP form -> ActionBean -> POJO -> Service -> DAO -> Save POJO
ughh
“Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.” – Marshall McLuhan
“JSP form -> ActionBean -> POJO -> Service -> DAO -> Save POJO
ughh”
[sarcasm]
Yea, screw patterns. Who needs ‘em.
[/sarcasm]
@Tom
That’s what I said, you can do crap whatever the technology, like manipulating rowsets directly in your HTML templates “because we don’t need all those overly complex patterns”, heh?
I think that the debate “PHP versus Java” or “scripting languages versus the-rest-of-the-world” is not a good debate. The real question that job interviewers should ask themselves is “is he a lazy guy or does he think ahead?” And whether we like it or not, some technologies are like easy money: if you are not used to deal with them with a cold head and some experience, you will waste it all in no time and go back to the miserable life you had before. And if somebody warns you, you’ll tax them with jealousy.
The truth is that there is no miracle technology, everything is ruled by balance and software doesn’t escape it: for every easy technology there is a price to pay. It’s all about compromise.
It’s not only Java only people opinion. Using a sledge-hammer to crack nuts – it’s a problem for .NET “adepts” too.