{"id":27,"date":"2006-07-19T20:46:49","date_gmt":"2006-07-20T00:46:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kralidis.ca\/blog\/2006\/07\/19\/php-implosion\/"},"modified":"2006-08-16T11:59:32","modified_gmt":"2006-08-16T15:59:32","slug":"php-implosion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kralidis.ca\/blog\/2006\/07\/19\/php-implosion\/","title":{"rendered":"PHP implosion"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve toyed with many different programming languages, development environments, application approaches and the like, and thus far I can be categorized as a REST<\/a> and Perl <\/a>hack. Perl is very dear to me. I used Perl for the first major project in my career<\/a> and in a slew of other applications, including owsview<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the last couple of years, I’ve been moving to Java (servlets, JSP, etc.) for webapps, which has been successful for the most part, but haven’t budged from a scripting point of view from Perl when I needed something really lightweight and quick and dirty.
\nUntil now. Enter PHP<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I took on a (non-geospatial; well almost, I used geocoder.ca<\/a> to geocode addresses, and output the newsfeed as GeoRSS<\/a> \ud83d\ude42 ) web project<\/a> this year for a friend, which I initially developed as a bunch of webpages and Perl CGIs. Worked fine. As time went on, I wanted to abstract things much more, and get heavy into templating, and did I mention I needed to have this done yesterday? So I looked for Perl templating systems.<\/p>\n

I ran into Template Toolkit<\/a>, which looked like a viable solution at the time, but I found it a bit confusing as to which approach to take (tt has both offline and real-time template processing).<\/p>\n

I then checked out Mason<\/a>, which I have used sparingly in the past, and got a bit farther along. I have a slow machine, so the mod_perl include in my Apache config looked to be bogging down the server.<\/p>\n

Finally, I looked at PHP, which I was familiar enough with from when we initially developed cwc2 (thereafter chameleon<\/a>) in 2002. I already had a PHP install (to run this blog), and it seemed I needed a couple of more options built in, so a recompile\/install did the trick.<\/p>\n

From there, things went ridiculously fast. All the Perl code was migrated to PHP in a matter of a day (if I didn’t use Perl strict, most of it could have went untouched). And the templating. In a day, I had templates of templates. Very turnkey. And driven by one config file.<\/p>\n

If you’re looking for a ‘but’, I’m afraid I don’t have one. We now have an abstracted product <\/a>which can be deployed with minimal configuration. All thanks to some PHP.<\/p>\n

I’m sure I haven’t even scratched the surface of what can be done, but for a simple, easy to maintain webapp, PHP has done the job. It would be interesting to hear what others use when they really want to bang out a webapp. At any rate, three cheers for PHP!<\/p>\n\n\n