OT: Future of PHP - LAMP Based Web Site Technology

[Josh Mellicker]

PHP is so entrenched it's not going away anytime in the next decade.

There are many PHP AJAX frameworks: http://ajaxpatterns.org/ 
PHP_Ajax_Frameworks

PHP is not as elegant as Ruby but a lot easier to learn and tweak.

LAMP is alive and well.

(Apple has a few pages using PHP but prefers their own "WebObjects".)

---

Rather than reinvent the wheel, I would strongly suggest adapting an  
existing open source CMS rather than starting from scratch.

The truth is, with Wordpress you can launch a finished website with a  
custom theme, AJAX search and display, media plaback, built-in  
podcasting and a zillion other possibilites through plugins (http:// 
codex.wordpress.org/Plugins#WordPress_Plugins_List).

It is fast, elegant and powerful. I always challenge anyone to think  
of functionality for a website that cannot be instantly added to  
Wordpress with one of the thousands of available plugins or fairly  
easily coded by most any PHP expert.

DVcreators.net is a Wordpress site: http://dvcreators.net/

There are hundreds of thousands more, and a strong, active developer  
community. And it's almost all free and open source.

It is sad to see so many struggle with last century HTML-built  
websites- where updating takes more than 60 seconds. I can add an  
article to our site faster than just opening Dreamweaver (which I  
haven't opened in years).

Avoid Joomla, it is an obsolete, unofficial offshoot of Mambo which  
is an archaic, buggy, badly designed CMS. If you want something more  
complex than Wordpress (but why make life more complicated than it  
needs to be?) check out Xoops or Drupal.


On Aug 24, 2007, at 3:52 PM, Sivakatirswami wrote:

> This is a super blue sky query for comment:
>
> We're interested in possibly outsourcing some web dev. In response  
> to any RFP we might issue
> we will no doubt get a number of developers using LAMP. I already  
> have one handy.
>
> All his web sites are *.php based  (and table based) zero  
> javascript or AJAX.
>
> We are wondering about the future of putting a huge amount of data
> into a PHP based web "container"
>
> Anyone have any comments? PHP is alive and well and moving forward...
> It is the basis for our wiki (PMwiki)
>
> On the other hand I don't see any in use in many progressive "Web  
> 2.0" sites.
> Not a single page at www.apple.com  google or Flickr uses PHP.
>
> If we were, e.g. to take "www.hinduismtoday.com" from it current  
> "retro" state
> (very much in need of a make over) to a new future, I'm concerned that
> pouring all that content into LAMP, could throttle any movement  
> forward after that...
>
> Our content is a perfect candidate from offering API's for mashups.
> And our "mission statement" would definitely involve taking the  
> wrapper
> off the data and making it available.
>
> This kind of code (below) makes me nervous... but I don't know if  
> my gut feeling
> is simply based on ignorance of the unknown, or if it is a valid  
> intuition that
> if we went this direction we would be hobbling our future:
>
> # every single dynamic element involves kicking the PHP can...
>
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> TIA:
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> Looking for the Big Picture
> on Future Web Dev
>
> Sivakatirswami
>
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