I've seen similar negative comments before on this list about PHP, and
I'm curious to know what informs them.
Maybe the fact that, when I coded a database object/form library, it took
me LONGER to ensure that empty strings / NULLs / zero valued floats and
integers / etc were handled correctly than it took me to code the entire
thing ?
I use PHP quite a bit, and though I wouldn't claim to be any sort of an
expert, I like it a lot: IMHO it's powerful, fast and easy to use. Mind
you, I came to PHP from an ASP/VBscript background, so anything would
have been an improvement.
LOL. Yeah.
Having said that, the main gripes I would have with PHP are (i)
variables aren't strongly typed, which can bite you unless you're
careful, and (ii) you don't have to declare variables before using them,
which can also cause trouble - in VBScript you have "option expicit"
which forces you to declare your variables; I'd like to see something
similar in PHP.
Apologies if this is off-topic for this list, but I'm curious as to why
others reckon that PHP sucks.....
It's a matter of mindset. PHP and Postgres have really opposite mindsets.
Python is a lot more similar to Postgres, for instance :
- Postgres, Python : strongly typed, throws an error rather than doing
funny stuff with your data, your code does what you think it should do.
- PHP : very loosely typed, does whatever it wants, your code will
surprise you...
To stay on topic :
- There is no way to know if your persistent connection is a new
connection (so you might want to setup and issue a few PREPARE statements)
or an already "second hand" connection.
- There is no way to reconnect a dead persistent connection (if you
reboot your database server, you'll have to restart all your
webservers/PHP processes manually)
- pg_query() returns everything as strings (python/psycopg2 converts
postgres types to python types, DATE becomes datetime.datetime, arrays
too, and you can customize it)
- handling of NULL, 0, '', array(), 0.0 is horrendous
- NO DAMN UNICODE SUPPORT WTF ? (python/psycopg does the right thing)
- register_shutdown_function() isn't always called
- the object model is horrible
- no closures or lexical scoping, no first class classes or function,
strings aren't objects
- built by accretion rather than thoughtful design
- etc, etc
Still, I use it, and it works. It is always poised to bite though. You
have to wear chain mail pants with PHP.
