Cebu web developer's "programming" language of choice

[cmontoya]

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Just curiousÂ*

[oon]

php is slow, drains server resources. not ideal for cebu or anywhere in the philippines for that matter. i use perl.

[sinus_]

really? is php that bad? (

[oon]

i don't know. programmers (like me) tend to be biased for perl, since PHP is a web scripting language rather than a true programming language. personally, i hate PHP because when i first tried it, it slowed down my server (in conjunction with a sql database) so much that i had to remove it. it hogged both cpu cycles and memory, and the performance was not good.

maybe recent versions are better. i just did a check on the web and while there is a heated debate of perl vs php, only few people are talking about speed. this might be because in the USA people tend to have fatter connections and newer computers, so it doesn't matter so much. but if you're using an old machine and your connection is not that good, every millisecond counts.

if you're just developing web sites, and you have the server resources to spare, PHP is great, go for it.

there are hundreds of threads of php vs perl. here's a thread i found on speed...

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mai...eneral/1221955

interestingly, the inventor of php is participating in this thread. i guess he got p!ssed off when people started saying php is slower than perl. for me, the real issue is memory handling.

[vern]

First off, Perl is scripting; PHP is scripting. It'd be absurd to put it in the same league as true programming languages such as C++ or Pascal. There are few who talk about the speed difference because except for the small few applications, the difference is negligible. The PH has the same access to resources and computers as the US does, so that argument is moot. Aside from corporate websites, you'll find most hardware that is run on the internet and that is used by many many American websites is dated hardware; hardware you can easily get your hands on in the PH. The machines that run sf.net are pretty dated P3 Coppermines, and yes they run PHP.

PHP was built for dynamic web content, and for what it does, it does it great. It doesn't presume to do anything else well although it does do other things, like application UI. I'm curious what kind of code you are trying to run that Perl was so much better than PHP in web development. Your server must not have been up to the task, your code was horrible, or both. I used to work developing a college website that gets hundreds of thousands of hits, and MySQL put more load on the server than PHP ever did. This seems more like an argument by perl fanatics to find relevance in web development in a more and more PHP, JSP, ASP, CFM, Python world.

[flashfreak]

i dont find php to be that bad when it comes to speed (thanks to broadband connections). i too have similar situation with vern, i have developed a golf site that generates mass amount of hits (well not as big as screwface's hits or any top seeded sites) and still i dont get any bandwidth issues. although the graphics and images are a bit too hi-res, it tends to slow down the loading time. but the codes are still doing fine. well, perl / cgi codes are far more better than php when it comes to dial-up connections. Utopia (a web-text based game) is a good cgi website.

btw, i voted for PHP... tho its not a programming "language".

[oon]

First off, Perl is scripting; PHP is scripting. It'd be absurd to put it in the same league as true programming languages such as C++ or Pascal.

well technically yes. but perl is more towards the 'language' side of the spectrum since you can do tons of stuff with perl you can't do with php, because perl wasn't specifically designed for the web

The PH has the same access to resources and computers as the US does, so that argument is moot. Aside from corporate websites, you'll find most hardware that is run on the internet and that is used by many many American websites is dated hardware; hardware you can easily get your hands on in the PH.

true, the philippines is not the subject of economic sanctions, and if you have the money you can buy anything people have in the US. but that is a big "if".

I'm curious what kind of code you are trying to run that Perl was so much better than PHP in web development. Your server must not have been up to the task, your code was horrible, or both.

er, yes, my server was not up to the task, that was my original point? wouldn't have been any problems if i had oodles and oodles of server capacity to spare. my code was probably not to blame because it ran ok when i wrote a database from scratch using perl. actually, if i think about it, the slowdown was probably mainly due to sql. but it boils down to the same thing. with perl you can code databases so easily and elegantly, they run much faster than php (+sql).

but, like i said before, if you have the server and you're mainly into websites, by all means, go for php. it's done wonders for the web... like for instance istorya.net

[oon]

i too have similar situation with vern, i have developed a golf site that generates mass amount of hits

didn't know there were any decent golf sites developed in cebu. can i take a look?

[Astang.Com]

I agree with both vern and flashfreak, I have an online dating/picture sharing website which generates thousands of hits per day and is very database dependent and pulls data from the database every time a page is veiwed but it does not even consumes that much of server load. By average, its daily bandwidth usage is 2-3 GIGs/day and average server load plays around 0.5-1.0 which in my server setup is pretty pretty pretty low.

Although I havent tried real PERL scripting, but most forums or resource websites that I found tends to favor PHP over Perl in terms of parsing speed and server load usage. I am not sure which sql database you are you using but PHP/mySQL is called the Dynamic Dou in the web development world.

[oon]

dynamic seguro in terms of server load. actually, this is probably more of a conflict between system administrators and content developers. the former hate it and the latter love it. if you run unix there are lots of tools you can use to monitor your server... and the minute someone starts using php/mysql you can tell right away. not so with perl (provided the script has been carefully coded with the server in mind).

but, for the third time, i have nothing against php. i am not surprised php is so popular, it's so easy to learn. it's just happens to be the case that i prefer perl, for the stated reasons... although that seems to put me in a minority in cebu.

maybe we're getting carried away here, with the perl vs php debate. the original point of this thread, if i understand it correctly, was to find out what people are using in cebu. so basically all i'm saying is that my websites and databases run on perl, because i prefer perl to php