PHP's scope

[karthik_jscript]

Hi all,
this is not a technical question, but just that something I wanted to ask my fellow PHP developers. I'm a PHP web app developer for an Indian ITES giant in bangalore. I've been trying to move to another project which works on PHP technology within my organisation, but to my surprise there are so few projects that use PHP. In contrst Java J2EE and .net is being used like crazy. I want to know why there is such a low acceptance/awarness for PHP? Is this a case only in India or everwhere else. I thought starting this discussion would gimme some answers. I don't know if this is the right forum to ask this, but I can't find any better place.

Regards,
Karthik

[NogDog]

Java has some advantages over PHP when it comes to large, enterprise type applications; not all necessarily having to do with the actual languages. Java was created as fully object-oriented from its inception, whereas PHP has not had anything approaching good OO support until PHP5. Java also has many tools (IDE's, debuggers, automated testing systems, etc.) to support the development of large, multi-developer projects; whereas PHP's choice of such tools is much slimmer. Additionally, Java has a lot of money behind it from Sun and other tool providers pushing corporations to use their tools (and as a side-effect, Java) whereas PHP does not. Lastly, many corporate decision-makers are reticent to use open-source tools like PHP for various reasons, and whether or not any or all of those reasons are valid concerns or not, the fact is that such prejudices do exist.

[karthik_jscript]

thanks for your reply!

[knowj]

On the .NET side of things. Most IT teams in companies are scares of anything that isn't windows. They think open source is the devil and won't have anything to do with it as they think its insecure.

Also it saves on large cooperations having to deal with setting up new hardware/software. .NET will also easily interface with other systems on the windows servers allowing easy authentication in the windows environment.

On the plus side a large percentage of the internet is running on UNIX/Linux hence a lot of websites using PHP this does also have a negative effect as it can be seen as unprofessional tool.

Finally Microsoft has qualifications to say that your a Certified Developer etc... to my knowledge they are no international/national PHP developer qualifications.

Still it's going to take more than men in suits to make me switch from PHP i can't fault the language. A good example is Facebook VS MySpace (which one works better, forgetting the user built applications side of things)

[NogDog]

...
Finally Microsoft has qualifications to say that your a Certified Developer etc... to my knowledge they are no international/national PHP developer qualifications.
...
Zend.com has a PHP certification program (http://www.zend.com/education/zend_php_certification). To the best of my knowledge, it's the only widely recognized one for PHP right now.

[bokeh]

Apples and oranges (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparing_apples_and_oranges). PHP is a runtime-compiled, server-side scripting language designed to process dynamic webpages whereas Java is a general purpose, pre-compiled, programming language, designed to run on a virtual machine to avoid the code having to be written in a platform specific fashion, with there being little crossover between the two. If you find there is more call for one over the other where you work that would be due to the type of clients the firm has (and what they use their software for) rather than the desirability of the language (on account of design, security, fashion, etc).