Although I've been mostly using Java and Ruby in my professional software development work for the past decade or so, in the past two or three years I've started to do more and more PHP. I originally started using PHP because I needed to set-up and customize Drupal for a project. Although as a programmer I've come to feel comfortable writing PHP code, I still don't feel like I have a good sense of where PHP is going as a platform and what's it's future is. As the Drupal site has continued to grow both in terms of features and usage, it's become clear that this is something that I need to research and educate myself about. That led me to give a closer look at Quercus, the implementation of PHP 5 that runs on top of the JVM. I'd already heard about it somewhere along the line, but it's only in the past couple of weeks that I've actually pulled it down, read through the documentation and some of the source and tried it out. So far I'm pretty impressed and enthusiastic about it. The cancellation of PHP 6 combined with the steady trickle of PHP-related bugs and security vulnerabilities that have become public over the past few years had made me very nervous about the future of the platform. Having an open-source implementation of PHP that runs on the JVM, which is like the gold standard for server application performance and reliability, is reassuring. The fact that it makes it easy and fast to use the huge library of Java frameworks out there in your PHP applications doesn't hurt either. Although I've had great results so far in my experiments with Quercus, I'm curious to hear about other PHP developers' experiences with it. Even though it seems like a significant number of people are using it for production applications, I'm curious why it's adoption isn't even higher than it is? Given the difficulties of writing a Virtual Machine, it seems like leveraging the JVM is a no brainer. Is there some technical drawback that I'm unaware of or is it just a case of inertia? Thanks. -- Arnold -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
