PHP and Java: Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts?
By Jim Jagielski
As a system administrator, I've always felt very comfortable in Perl. It has a significant advantage over other languages because there are so many Perl scripts available on the Web. However, when I learned about PHP—called PHP/FI at the time—I became an immediate convert.
I liked its syntax, Web-specific focus, and speed compared to Perl. I also liked the fact that the scripts I wrote in it were easy enough for users to understand and maintain on their own. There was a good relationship between Apache and PHP that I wanted to foster as an open-source advocate, core developer of Apache, and the executive vice president and secretary of the Apache Software Foundation. So when I was offered my current job as CTO of Zend Technologies—a company that provides tools, services, and products to extend the PHP scripting language—I jumped at the opportunity to help promote PHP. In fact, my official title at Zend is CTO and PHP evangelist.
I think that using PHP can significantly reduce the time to market, which obviously should translate to a better market position for any company that employs it. And companies look to separate programming logic from presentation logic, many are now using PHP with Java.
There are solid reasons for this migration. One important factor is that PHP has always been a Web-specific language. This trickles down to some very valuable benefits. PHP has Web-specific functions that make Web-application developers' lives much easier. For example, instead of requiring you to know which regular expression is required to strip out HTML entities or protect quotes, PHP provides functions that do this for you.
