On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 6:27 AM, Matthew Toseland<toad at amphibian.dyndns.org> wrote: >> > I disagree, php or java reduces performance and increases costs, for all >> > hosting options. >> >> Are you serious? ?I can imagine someone making that kind of argument >> against dynamic page generation in 1994, but not now. > > It happens to be true. On grounds of security, performance and cost. We get a > lot of hits, and any cheap hosting option, including the Google app platform, > will be much slower with .php's than with static HTML.
Well, firstly you can't use PHP on the Google App platform, it has to be Python or Java, and I suspect in either case it will be as fast as we could ever need it to be. > And we don't want an expensive hosting option: we want to save money. Crippling our website to save a few dollars per month (and that is, at most, all it would be) is extremely short-sighted. Google App Engine is free up to a pretty high traffic volume AFAIK. I think we'd probably have a hard time finding hosting that *didn't* support some form of dynamic page generation. >> I don't like using Javascript for this, and I certainly don't like the >> assumption that we are no-longer permitted to do any dynamic page >> generation server side. ?That is crazy. > > We don't use it now. We haven't used it for years, all the php stuff is is > SSIs, which > can be compiled in advance. But please step back a bit: we are talking about > what > happens *when javascript is turned off*. Only paranoid geeks turn off > javascript. If > they have to choose their OS then that's no great hardship for them. Except that it appears to be unreliable even with Javascript turned on. I experienced problems with it in Safari 4 (with Javascript most assuredly switched on). > Of course it is true that all plausible hosting options support php, but just > because > they support it doesn't mean that there is any good reason to use it on the > homepage. There is a reason that practically every website on the Internet uses server-side page generation (PHP or otherwise). Declaring that our entire website must be static is an arbitrary, pointless, and very limiting restriction. I'm not aware of a single other website anywhere that has opted to limit itself to static page generation, either on the grounds of security or cost. This is because its a crazy argument. Ian. -- Ian Clarke CEO, Uprizer Labs Email: ian at uprizer.com Ph: +1 512 422 3588 Fax: +1 512 276 6674
