I am wondering if there are any languages that extend PHP into something ahem "better"?
They don't have to necessarily be able to interact with PHP, but it is certainly a benefit if they can (e.g. call PHP functions or even be called from PHP).
One example:
The LOL Code PHP Parser: http://www.tetraboy.com/lolcode/
There's Facebook Hip Hop. It takes PHP, compiles it down to C++, and then compiles that into a big fat binary with a webserver included. Then you just deploy that. It ends up being a big file - weighing in at 1 GB - but it reduces server load by upwards of 50%.
We have some discussion on php|architect - http://www.phparch.com/?s=hiphop
There is Haxe, that compiles into PHP (among other things): Haxe.org
Here's an article from CodingHorror about Wasabi, a language which apparently compiles down to PHP among other strange things:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-shark.html
If you mean extending PHP's capabilities, I assume the plentiful modules that exist for it already do that...
FogBugz is written in a custom in-house extension of VBScript that they can compile to either VBScript or PHP (for Windows and Unix servers, respectively). Their compiler is written in C#.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html is a good read.
Related
i have been using the awesome bambalam: http://www.bambalam.se/bamcompile/ compiler to make exe from php source.
But it's getting old, and it doesn't support php5.
Is there another project that will do the trick?
Thanks
ADD1:
i need only for windows
Please note, this was answered before the OP added the vitally important "I need only for windows" addition to the question.
Well the way Facebook handle this is by compiling to an intermediary language, C++, via a piece of software called HipHop for PHP.
There's also PHC, and a few others. Zend Server caches the bytecode which helps a lot.
You can try exe output, get it here, www.exeoutput.com. It has amazing features supports html, flash, javascript, php, etc.
Give a try to one of these tools:
PHPFlexer, if you only have a single php file (like a quick commandline tool)
RapidEXE, if it's several files/folders; here you can even choose a PHP version
PHC-Win, it's the ancestor of PHPFlexer and works pretty well
ExeOutput, a big monster but it gives you a webserver environment and a nice GUI
ZZEE, despite its silly name it's pretty good but features some oldish PHP
The first 3 is command-line, the last 2 are able to develop a window-based application; but they're slow, sometimes a bit tricky to configure and they also make a big fat exe file that loads relatively slow (especially ExeOutput). Command line ones are pretty compact and easy to use, with an output exe around 2MB.
I need to create a web application that tars files on a remote server then moves those files to another server. I am new to scripting languages and was wondering if there are advantages to php or perl for this type of application.
Not really. Both will get the job done just as good as the other. The bottleneck of both will be connecting to the remote server.
PHP was originally derived from Perl, so the syntax between the two are very similar. It's all a matter of taste.
PHP is nice because many Apache servers are setup to allow you to embed PHP code inside your HTML pages. This makes PHP very popular in building things like CMS systems and bulletin boards.
I personally think that the PHP syntax is sloppy. There's way too many specific functions and they're not clearly thought out. The syntax changes from one function to another. I guess it's part of PHP's group based philosophy where a lot of people add a lot of features. I also like Perl's use strict and use warnings pragmas which I find save me a lot of grief.
But, as I said, when it comes to webpage development, PHP is ahead of Perl.
(Yes, I know about modperl, but that's not usually installed in most Apache servers).
I'd say to go ahead and learn both. I believe the Perl books are some of the best written programming guides I've seen. I haven't been too thrilled with the PHP ones. Maybe its because Perl is just more established, so the documentation has been better defined.
Then again, if you're going to learn something, maybe you should try Python. I'm not a fan of Python, but its the up and coming language that most people are learning these days. Google uses Python extensively. And, don't forget Ruby which has the webbased Rails platform that's very popular.
By the way, what you want to do isn't part of the default language, but most languages have modules that are easily installable. For example, you'll need Archive::Tar and LWP for Perl. These can be downloaded from the CPAN module archive.
It's going to take you a while to pick up enough of any language to do what you want, so be patient and have fun.
You need this ssh extension http://php.net/manual/en/book.ssh2.php
It support calling ssh using ssh2_connect.
And you can bundle with tar, scp, or even rsync
I have a PHP class I want to convert to a PHP extension. I checked some tutorials (tuxradar's writing extensions, php.net's extending php, and zend's extension writing) and it's a bit complicated.
I found the article "How to write PHP extensions" (ed note: site is defunct) and I wanted to know if it is possible to use this to make it grab a PHP class from a certain path (say /home/website1/public_html/api/class.php), execute it and return the class instance.
This way it will be usable in other websites that are hosted on the same server – each can simply call the function and it will obtain its own instance.
Is that possible?
The question as I understand it now is, The user has a PHP class that they would like to share with multiple people, but does not want to share the source code.
There are many solutions to this, they generally invovle turning the PHP code into some kind of byte code, and using a PHP extension to run the byte code. I've never used any of these solutions, but I'm aware of the following:
phc is an open source compiler for PHP
Zend Guard
HipHop for PHP - I'm unsure about this, but Facebook recently released it so it might be worth a look.
I'm sure there are others. Just Google for PHP Compiler, or PHP Accelerator.
In one sentence: I don't believe so, I think its a lot more work than that.
No, there is not tool that can do that.
Anyway, what you want call be easily accomplished with auto_prepend_file. Just make that ini directive point to a PHP file that has the class definition, and then it will be available to all the applications.
If you don't want the users to be able to use the source, you can use one the several zend extensions that allow you to pre-compile the file and use it in that form.
You can extend underlying C library functions into PHP space by writing PHP extensions. However, i think in your case you don't need to write one.
I am aware that this is an old question (being from 2012) however the answer has changed and there is now a tool that can do this. Jim Thunderbirds PHP-to-C Extension toolset provides the means to take a simple class in one file all the way up to a complicated multi file multi-level namespaced framework and convert it to a C-extension that can then be installed into your PHP server.
While in many use cases doing so is not needed as the ordinary PHP code will work just as good in some cases significant performance improvements can be experienced. The information page shows that an ordinary class (deliberately designed to take a long time) took 16.802139997482 seconds as plain vanilla PHP, and 3.9628620147705 as a PHP extension built using the tool.
As an added advantage the tool also provides an additional feature. The ability to combine PHP code (to be converted to C) and native C code within the same extension which can produce even greater performance enhancements. The same example used above only tool 0.14397192001343 seconds when much of the intensive code was moved to a bubble sort C code and simply calling it from within the PHP code.
As a side note functionally to the end developers using the code using the extension is very much similar to having the files manually included in the PHP file being developed except it doesn't have to be specifically included as it is done through the PHP extensions component.
(Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with this developer but am glad to have come across it as it is thus far working for converting some of my intensive classes into PHP extensions without needing to know C).
I am working on a project that requires reading text files, extracting data from them, and then generating reports (text files). Since there are a lot of string parsing, I decided to do it in Perl or Python or PHP (preference in that order). But I don't want to expose the source code to my client. Is there any good compiler for compiling perl/python/php scripts into linux executables?
I am not looking for a 100% perfect one, but I am looking for an at least 90% perfect one. By perfect, I mean the compiler doesn't require to write scripts with a limited subset of language features.
I'm sorry, it's simply not worth spending your time on. For any language you choose (from among the ones you listed), for any compiler/obfuscator someone chooses to come up with, I promise you I can get readable source code out of it (within an hour if it's Perl; longer if it's Python or PHP simply because I'm less acquainted with the implementations of those languages, not because it's intrinsically harder with those languages).
I think you should take a better look at what your goals are and why you want to work for a client that you're assuming a priori wants to rip you off. And if you still want to go ahead with such a scheme, write in C or Fortran -- certainly not anything starting with "P".
There does exist a Compiler for perl, called perlcc. I'm not familar with perl, but it looks like what you're looking for.
There are 3 options of encrypting Perl code:
Use PAR to create executable file with PAR::Filter::Obfuscate or PAR::Filter::Crypto
Use Filter::Crypto::CryptFile (will require some modules installed on target OS)
Turn into module and encrypt into Module::Crypt.
Also you can try B::C - it was removed from core Perl distribution and is now available on CPAN.
So far we've heard about perlcc and PAR with some obfuscation filters. These may work.
I have had very good luck with ActiveState's PerlApp which is part of their Perl Dev Kit.
It works well to bundle your code and hide it. You can try it for free, and it comes with some nice extras. Whether it is expensive or cheap depends on your perspective. For me, it was cheap. The cost in time of getting code hiding working and reliable with PAR or messing with perlcc was easily less than the price of the package. YMMV.
For Python You can call your code and give the *.pyc file to the client.
For linux an executable is something which has +x set, so there's no need to compile scripts. To hide your sourcecode you could use an obfuscator. This makes your sourcecode unreadable.
I've never used this, so I don't know how easy it is to setup, but you could use HipHop PHP to turn your PHP scripts into C++ code and compile them. (Assuming you choose to write them in PHP)
http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/358
http://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php
For Python you can use cx.freeze. I have not used this but I believe that it basically bundles the .pyc into a zip file and adds an executable front-end.
Alternatively you could try compiling you Python code with Cython. this translates a modified version of the Python language into C code, which can then be compiled. This is normally used to write high performance extensions or interface with existing C libraries, but the latest version can also be used to make a complete executable.
This is something I've always wondered: Why is PHP slower than Java or C#, if all 3 of these languages get compiled down to bytecode and then executed from there? I know that normally PHP recompiles each file with each request, but even when you bring APC (a bytecode cache) into the picture, the performance is nowhere near that of Java or C# (although APC greatly improves it).
Edit:
I'm not even talking about these languages on the web level. I am talking about the comparison of them when they're number crunching. Not even including startup time or anything like that.
Also, I am not making some kind of decision based on the replies here. PHP is my language of choice; I was simply curious about its design.
One reason is the lack of a JIT compiler in PHP, as others have mentioned.
Another big reason is PHP's dynamic typing. A dynamically typed language is always going to be slower than a statically typed language, because variable types are checked at run-time instead of compile-time. As a result, statically typed languages like C# and Java are going to be significantly faster at run-time, though they typically have to be compiled ahead of time. A JIT compiler makes this less of an issue for dynamically typed languages, but alas, PHP does not have one built-in. (Edit: PHP 8 will come with a built-in JIT compiler.)
I'm guessing you are a little bit into the comparing of apples and oranges here - assuming that you are using all these languages to create web applications there is quite a bit more to it than just the language. (And lots of the time it is the database that is slowing you down ;-)
I would never suggest choosing one of these languages over the other on the basis of a speed argument.
Both Java and C# have JIT compilers, which take the bytecode and compile into true machine code. The act of compiling it can take time, hence C# and Java can suffer from slower startup times, but once the code is JIT compiled, its performance is in the same ballpark as any "truly compiled" language like C++.
The biggest single reason is that Java's HotSpot JVM and C#'s CLR both use Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation. JIT compilation compiles the bytecodes down to native code that runs directly on the processor.
Also I think Java bytecode and CIL are lower-level than PHP's internal bytecode which might make alot of JIT optimizations easier and more effective.
A wild guess might be that JAVA depends on some kind of "application" server, while PHP doesn't -- which means a new environnement has to be created each time a PHP page is called.
(This was especially true when PHP was/is used as a CGI, and not as an Apache module or via FastCGI)
Another idea might be that C# and JAVA compilers can do some heavy optimisations at compile time -- on the other side, as PHP scripts are compiled (at least, if you don't "cheat" with an opcode cache) each time a page is called, the compilation phase has to be real quick ; which means it's not possible to spend much time optimizing.
Still : Each version of PHP generally comes with some amelioration of the performances ; for instance, you can gain between 15% and 25% of CPU, when switching from PHP 5.2 to 5.3.
For instance, take a look at those benchmarks :
Benchmark of PHP Branches 3.0 through 5.3-CVS
Performance PHP 5.2 vs PHP 5.3 - huge gain
Bench PHP 5.2 vs PHP 5.3 -- disclaimer : it's in french, and I'm the one who did it.
One important thing, also, is that PHP is quite easy to scale : just add a couple of web servers, and voila !
The problem you often meet when going from 1 to several servers is with sessions -- store those in DB or memcached (very easy), and problem solved !
As a sidenote : I would not recommend choosing a technology because there is a couple of percent difference of speed on some benchmark : there are far more important factors, like how well your team know each technology -- or, even, the algorithms you are going to use !
There is no way an interpreted language can be faster than a compiled language or even a JIT language under trivial conditions.
Unless your test program consists of printing out "Hello Worlds" if you are concerned about speed, stick with C# or Java.
Depends on what you want to do. In some cases, PHP is definitely faster. PHP is (pretty) good at file manipulation and other basic stuff (also XML stuff). Java or C# might be slower in those cases (though I didn't benchmark).
Also, the PHP output (HTML or whatever) needs to be downloaded to the browser, which also consumes time.
Also, the speed of Java / C# is very much depending on the machine it runs on (which could be multiple). Java / C# could be slow on your computer, while PHP just runs on one server from which it is available and is always as fast as the server is (except for download times, etc.).
I don't think they are comparable in a general manner. I think you need to take a task, which you could be accomplished with those three programming languages, and then compare that. That is basically always what you should do when choosing a programming language; find the one that fits the task. Don't shape the task until it fits the programming language.
According to wikipedia, PHP uses The Zend Engine, which does not have a JIT.