On Mon, Aug 06, 2001 at 03:14:05PM -0400, Scott R. Godin wrote:
> I'm in a situation where there are a small number of people looking to
> migrate a large well-traveled website from their current host (which is
> on NT and makes extensive use of .asp, and ms-sql), to a red-hat linux
> box of their own making, running apache, php, and mysql. I'd already
> coded up a number of enhancements to the original site within the past
> year, only to hit the stumbling block of having the current host
> unwilling to make the *slightest* effort at upgrading the perl
> installation or modules on their sole unix box (they have 30 or so NT
> boxes) . . . .
>
> I need some ammunition. what have you got that I can really *use* here?
PHP is based on a model of a-file-is-a-page. It's easy to set up a
moderately useful dynamic website using PHP due to its shallow learning
and implementation curves, but when you're done, what you've got is a
website with an enumerated set of states, each of which corresponds to a
file.
This is not how the world is (mostly).
Eventually, you're going to want a system where the number of different
states becomes huge. You'll probably be able to pull this off using PHP if
you've designed the site with a component mindset, but it will get very
difficult, *and it will stop looking like PHP*.
In short, if your dynamic site can be described as a set of screen
shots _without_ notations like `this toolbar only appears if the user has
selected such-and-so preference' or `draw this as a frameset unless the
user has browser XYZ', and you like PHP, then there's nothing wrong with
PHP. If you really sit down and think about the future, though, you
probably can't promise that your site will always be that way.
And even if you can promise that, you might want to think about
Template Toolkit or HTML::Mason.
- Kurt
P.S. I know that PHP can do a lot more than I've talked about. I'm
discussing what, IMHO, PHP encourages, and is good at.
