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I first learned web programming with php a while back. It has some features that I find very helpful, but the overall language is not something I enjoy, just as a matter of personal preference. I am wondering what alternatives I could use to provide similar functionality using a different underlying programming language (Python? Ruby?).
What I am looking for:
general purpose programming capability
in-line server-side code embedded in HTML (i.e. I want to be able to make my documents pure HTML if desired, rather than demanding special syntax even where I don't want dynamic content)
access to request parameters
ability to send headers, set cookies, etc
Preferably:
does not require a separate server process
easy to connect with Apache
Does anyone have any suggestions?
One thing I tried to do was embedded Ruby (erb) through CGI. This looked like a good fit on paper. Unfortunately, I was not able to get it to work, because I was following a few different guides and the result of combining them did not work out. At any rate, it seems this would not allow me to set arbitrary headers (and more importantly, use sessions and cookies).
Note: I'm not looking for a full web framework at the moment. Just relatively small amounts of dynamic content among otherwise HTML pages.
Thanks!
You've hit on the big reason why PHP is so popular - it has all of those pieces in a server-embeddable package. There aren't really many solutions with its ease of deployment; PHP is written specifically for what you want, which is both its strength and weakness. It's why it's such a weak general-purpose language, and why everyone and their dog knows it. It's everywhere, and the barrier to entry is near zero.
PHP is a language plus templating plus a web framework all baked into one package. To get an equivalent, you're going to need a web framework, even if it's a small one. Something like Sinatra is a super lightweight way to do similar in Ruby, though it requires a separate server process.
You could look at something like Perl with cgi.pm, but it may be a step in the wrong direction if you're wanting something cleaner than PHP.
I don't know Python packages well enough to offer suggestions there, but Twisted makes it easy to bind a Python program to a web interface. That does end up running in its own server process, though.
You'll need to do a little more work than your standard PHP deploy if you want to use something besides PHP, but that's often a choice that people consider to be a reasonable tradeoff for gains in productivity.
Python Flask is a good web framework: it fits your requirements, easy to learn, and scales gracefully. Go through the tutorial to see!
I have three suggestions.
The first is Ruby on Rails - It's pretty fun once you get into it.. I would recommend going through Rails for Zombies to get a general idea of whether you like it or not.
http://railsforzombies.org/
It's really easy to get something up and running on Heroku for free, so you don't have to spend any money to get something up on the web..
My second suggestion is one I'm just trying out called Node.js. I'd recommend watching this video to get an idea of what it's about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jo_B4LTHi3I
If you're into Javascript, I think you'll get it right away. You can also build an open source Node.js project on www.cloud9ide.com which is pretty nifty too.
A third one, if you're into learning Java, is "Play". A cool video on this is:
http://vimeo.com/7087610
I haven't used this much, but it's on my "to do" list of things to check out. Overall, I suggest just dipping your toes in the water for a bunch of different frameworks and get an idea of how they work and then you'll naturally pursue whatever makes the most sense to you. Good luck!
I'd say given your requirement
Just relatively small amounts of dynamic content among otherwise HTML pages.
then, PHP is going to be hard to beat for getting going quickly and a minimum of learning overhead. It avoids all the CGI issues that you would otherwise have to deal with, and is in fact its own templating language. That's why so many get started with it. Once you get past the point of your goal of mixing a little programming logic into HTML pages, and developing more flexible, maintainable and testable applications, then frameworks such as Rails, Django and others will be worth your time to learn.
Using Scheme as a web development language meets your criteria, with a caveat: instead of inline code embedded in HTML, you have inline code embedded in the Lisp-ish representation of HTML called s-expressions. (There is a one-to-one correspondence between HTML and is s-exp equivalent; they can be interconverted with one function call.) So the static parts of your page and the code share the same syntax - something I really like about Scheme.
> (sxml->xml `(div (p "It's been: " (i ,(current-time)) " seconds")))
<div>
<p>
It's been: <i>1339772791</i> seconds
</p>
</div>
I've been coding php for years, and now i have to finally make my own project, and i want it very optimized and shiny. So, i've been searching around the net about which programming language should i use for my needs (fast, secure, easy-understandable, customizable) and all points to -> Python. So I decided to go on, but i just can't feel "home" when writing python (inc Django app...). I got used to PHP's syntax, and my IDE (PHP Expert Editor 4.3) makes php look awesome, so now i just can't go with python.
Maybe there is something which has php's syntax (let's say per example: Perl)...but the advantages of a high-level programming language (aka Python)?
Use what you like and what you know. If you want to try something new that's ok .. but if you want to start a serios project now I would not use a new language for this.
Maybe better look what you could do better with php. (Maybe use a better template engine or design clever classes or whatever). Many huge webapps are developed with php and are working very well.
Also I would not say that Django is a highly optimized framework .. if you want to look into something new well documented you could check the flask microframework http://flask.pocoo.org/
This line of work requires you to adjust to different syntaxes (even in PHP alone you need to know sql and js and Css and html too...).
So the answer is no, there is nothing like what you ask, and you better get used to that :-)
b.t.w is Python really faster than PHP?
If you've been coding in PHP for years, then maybe PHP is still the right choice for you? As long as your project is related to web (by the way Facebook uses PHP!) you should stick to it.
Python is really easy and fun to learn, but as any other programming language - it requires time to get into it. And for web projects, you'll have to catch up with frameworks and maybe servers (e.g. tornado).
If you'd like to do something on enterprise level, Java is also a good choice. But never as easy and as fun as Python :)
I'm a PHP developer. I like PHP! It is a really good language if you know how to use it, but I know it allows very bad design sometimes.
It reminds me of JavaScript which has good parts and bad parts. One particular project, CoffeeScript, tries to focus only on the good parts, forcing you to write good code.
I was thinking if something similar could be done with PHP... A new syntax that would be compiled only to good PHP code taking advatage of all the new and exciting stuff we can get with PHP 5.3.
So, getting ahead of some people, I'll ask: Why create a new language on top of PHP if you can just use Ruby or Python or something else?
PHP is easy to deploy anywhere
The language itself has a lot of good features and ideas
There are lots of good libraries written in PHP
...
So, my real questions here are...
Is this a stupid idea? Why would it be? Do you think CoffeeScript is stupid?
How do someone starts to create a new language on top of another? I know nothing about this, but I would like to learn. Where to start?
The idea is definitely not stupid, especially if executed well.
I like coffeescript a lot, but it has it's approach has downsides as well. Debugging a coffeescript script still requires you read the generated Javascript code, which can be tedious, since you haven't written it actually yourself.
I've understood that Jeremy Ashkenas, the creator of coffeescript has started to work on coffeescript after reading "Create your own freaking awesome programming language" by Marc-André Cournoyer.
Good luck!
The reason CoffeScript is a good idea is that if developers want to run code in a client browser they have to use javascript; so the only way to program in a different language is to allow that language to be convertible to javascript.
I'm not sure the same really applies to server side programming. If you've got issues with PHP and want to use a new language there is no real advantage to having that language generate PHP.
On the other hand, a language that was very similar to PHP, but fixed some of the flaws would be a great idea.
Heh, great idea. My thoughts, some contradictory...
There are precedents for civilizing bad languages by putting syntax preprocessors in front of them.
In the early days of Unix, Fortran was popular and about the only portable language because most machines had no C compiler. But the vanilla Fortran of the day didn't even have block structured if-then-else, just a goofy single-statement if or an if-goto. So, the Ratfor language was implemented as a preprocessor for Fortran-66.
I believe there were (are?) Cobol preprocessors that presumably dealt with the verbosity and limitations of early Cobol dialects.
To this day Unix-derived systems ship with a macro processor called m4.
Several CSS preprocessors are available today, most notably Sass and LESS.
But...
Just let it die, and the sooner the better
The problem isn't really in the syntax.
I don't see much of a JavaScript-PHP parallel. JavaScript is a great language. It's kind of the opposite of PHP.
I'm not sure why you say that PHP is a great language. It's one of the worst. Every decent feature is a patch or repatch in a recent version.
As you noted, there is a fixed-up version of PHP already: it's called Ruby and, as a language, it's near-perfect. There is another fixed-up version called Python. The world would be better off in the long run if we support the better systems.
It is here now. A new language which is to PHP what CoffeeScript is to Javascript. (I.e., awesome.)
SNOWSCRIPT
Snowscript code looks like this:
fn how_big_is_it(number)
if number < 100
<- "small"
else
<- "big"
PHP output looks like this:
function how_big_is_it($number) {
if ($number < 100) {
return "small";
} else {
return "big";
}
}
All it needs now, is you.
If it would be to PHP what something like sass is to CSS, I'd be interested. But what would exactly would you want to add? Or would you just want to weed out the bad?
And what would you consider to be the bad?
Writing a PHP syntax transformer would probably be a neat project.
However, don't forget that PHP's standard library is a huge mess. Cleaning that up, would be a far bigger task.
The more I am thinking about this, the more irrealistic it sounds. The reason is simple: There actually are such language proprocessors already. Two of them (though not using PHP as implementation, only as compilation target) can be found here. But simply nobody uses them.
Yes, if the compiler itself were written in PHP, probably more people would use it. But I really can't see a way how to get this popular enough to be worth the work.
Another big problem is, that people mostly are used to their awesome code-highlighting, code-completing, code-inspecting IDE. Without getting IDE support probably merely anybody will use it (and IDE support can only be obtained by having many people use it...)
Thoughts?
I can see writing compilers to JavaScript (because the web imposes it upon us), but this sounds like a waste of time.
Haxe already does this, although it's not specifically targeted at PHP (linked to the Wikipedia article instead of their website because I'm afraid I'm going to get exploited if I visit the real site...)
PHP is easy to deploy anywhere
...as are its vulnerabilities.
I know it allows very bad design sometimes.
That's a bit of an understatement, it doesn't even have a module system, has no encapsulation, and has tons of silly things such as dynamic name resolution.
PHP is slow enough as it is, do you really want something an order of a magnitude slower?
Java is much more easy to deploy anyways, and lets you drop down to the bytecode level if you want. Java also gives you access to moderately sane libraries.
This is something I have thought about already often. PHP just is messy at some points.
Actually, I already have a project PrePHP focusing on providing PHP 5.3 functionality to PHP 5.2. But it adds some minor language features, like func()[0]. I haven't developed this project for some time and it definitely isn't "clean", but it shows, that what you want is possible and actually even not that complicated.
If you are serious about this, I am perfectly willing to collaborate with you.
Very interesting idea and if it come to life i think that i wan't to be involved in :)
For start You may check and read this position http://www.amazon.com/Masterminds-Programming-Conversations-Creators-Languages/dp/0596515170 (iam reading it now). It makes clear how really complicated is to maintain own language.
I agree that PHP definitely could do with some improvement, right now it allows for too much fooling around.
Some things I'd like to see
Static Typing
Required indentation
Proper use of objects (using arrays as objects is just stupid)
Then again, maybe I should just drop PHP and start working with Ruby or Python.
I'm like 8 years too late, but I'll answer anyways for anyone else who stumbles upon this.
Hack is a language developed by Facebook to deal with some of the issues of PHP, since Facebook had a large PHP codebase. Hack adds some nice features on top of PHP such as gradual typing (what TypeScript has) and generics, among other features, and gets rid of some of the more dangerous PHP features. Hack was at one point a superset of PHP, but is no longer completely compatible after removing some of the worse PHP features.
This is slightly different from what you were asking, since at this point Hack has its own interpreter, written by Facebook, but this started out as "better language that compiles to PHP", so I thought it was worth mentioning here.
I'm looking for problems I can generalize, recognize later (in design), and say
"Hey, if I continue down this road I'm going to hit trouble. PHP + JS just weren't meant for this."
If I'm using PHP+JS what can't I do? What shouldn't I attempt? What do you suggest instead?
It is software, almost anything you can imagine is possible, given enough time and resources. I don't see how PHP would preclude you from doing anything in JavaScript, or anything in JavaScript could preclude you doing something in PHP. They are separate technologies which run at each end of the client/server architecture which can be built to work cooperatively.
It's easy to get in trouble with PHP and JS by themselves without using some type of framework. PHP can degrade into a mess of spaghetti code quickly if you do not follow some type of convention like the Zend Framework or others.
That said, I don't think you'll find anything that PHP CANNOT do ...
I'd take a look at this and see what the limitations of JS are. The reason this is important to know is that xml performance on JS is just bad, use JSON. The other thing to note is that if you really need to show that many rows of data on a page, it would be better to use flash/flex solution. [warning, that link doesn't work for Firefox 3, it just dies]
I will note though that most of my experience has pointed me to the fact that there normally isn't a reason to show that many things on a page. If I come across a usecase, I usually can just AJAX something in on the fly to keep from having to load so many things at once.
The only problem you will encounter is at least 10 years away when Javascript or some kind of open source scripting framework becomes the Web standard. Server side scripting languages like PHP, ASP, JSP, etc and Plugins like Flash, SVG, VRML fill in gaps that a relatively slow client side scripting language like Javascript cannot accomadate. In the future, as PCs get faster and Javascript engines continue to get more efficient, you will see the gradual decline of 3rd party solutions like Server side scripting and plugins. Then the only problem you will face is a bunch of old code that gets laughed at by the cyber punks zooming by on their anti gravity boards. Ofcourse, this is in the future, and by the looks of things the specs people loving dragging their feet.
So in short, PHP is your only hope for doing anything useful in a browser for the forseeable future. Your only worry should be whether you want to learn ASP instead, its pretty cool. Although PHP has a huge community and code snippets galore.
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I would like to be a PHP/MySQL programmer
What are the technologies that I must know?
Like:
Frameworks
IDEs
Template Engines
Ajax and CSS Frameworks
Please tell me the minimum requirements that I must know, and tell me your favourite things in the previous list?
Thanks
First off, there is no must know about learning PHP and MySQL... You go into it not knowing anything, and you'll come out of it knowing a bunch. If there was a must know, then nobody would be able to get into PHP and MySQL development. I personally think you are at a slight advantage going into this without knowing everything about it. It'll give you a fresh perspective and a think outside of the box attitude :)
As far as the object oriented stuff in this thread, it's true. But, as others have said, it's completely up to the programmer (you) to decide how to write your code. You can use object oriented practices, make a spaghetti code junction, or just right a bunch of functions, or whatever. Either way, as everyone else has been saying, it's up to you :)
IRC channel:
Don't really need this, but I find it helpful... See you in here :)
irc.freenode.net #php
Manual:
The manual is your friend and probably the only thing you should know before diving in.
http://www.php.net/manual/en/
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/apis-php.html
Frameworks:
Make sure it's an MVC framework :)
http://www.cakephp.org/
http://www.phpmvc.net/
http://www.codeigniter.com/
http://www.symfony.com/
http://www.laravel.com
http://www.yiiframework.com/
IDE:
Whatever suits you best :)
http://www.eclipse.org/
http://www.vim.org/
http://www.zend.com/en/products/studio/
http://php.netbeans.org/
https://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/
Template engines:
PHP is a good template engine
Model view controller frameworks help with this
twig.sensiolabs.org
http://www.smarty.net/
Ajax:
http://jquery.com/
http://www.mootools.net/
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/
http://www.prototypejs.org/
http://www.extjs.com/
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
https://angularjs.org/
CSS:
http://www.yaml.de/en/home.html
http://code.google.com/p/blueprintcss/
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/reset/
Definitely not an exhaustive list, and things change constantly... But, it's a start :)
Have fun!
Chrelad
Security is an important topic every web programmer should study before being allowed to post code that can be accessed publicly on the internet.
Examples of security issues:
Injection flaws
Cross-site scripting flaws
Cross-site request forgery
There are more security issues that you should know and keep in mind as you write PHP applications. The website http://www.owasp.org contains lots of useful information to help.
PHP was my first language, which I learned on the side while working as an office junior in my first job over 10 years ago. Here is some things from my experience:
Download the PHP manual, print it off, and start reading from page one. Keep going till you're at the end. Skim over the bits you probably won't need (like using KADM5 or Hyperwave) but always read the introductions so you know what PHP is capable of (this will save you trying to re-invent the wheel). The PHP documentation blows the docs of pretty-much every other language I've worked with since out of the water.
Next step; set up PHP. Manually. Don't use XAMPP or anything else, do it yourself. It always helps to know how your environment is set up.
Don't bother with an IDE at the beginning. Getting to know a language means getting up-close-and-personal. IDEs obscure things in an attempt to help you GetThingsDone which works great when you know what you're doing and know your target environment, but when you're starting out they just get in the way and hide what's important.
Don't bother with frameworks at the beginning, either. Again, they're there to help you GetThingsDone which only works when you know what you're doing in the first place. Start with the basics, otherwise you'll be learning the framework and not PHP.
PHP is essentially an advanced templating engine. Don't fall into the trap of over-hyped "PHP templating engines". They're just doing what PHP already does, doubling-up on the work and running twice as slow as PHP does. Stick with inline html/php to start with. Again, this'll help you get to understand what PHP is, how it works, and when to use it.
As with AJAX and CSS... they're nothing to do with PHP, but with the output you produce from PHP (and with AJAX getting input in). Don't load your plate with too much to eat at once. Start with plain PHP+HTML, and do your CSS by hand. Then, when you're happy, mix in a little javascript.
The best thing you can do with any language is learn the environment you're going to be working in, because programming is (relatively) similar across all of them. They all have loops, data structures, input/output, etc, but they all work just that little differently.
Don't believe the hype. I'm moving from PHP to Python at the moment and I could've just jumped on the Django band-wagon to GetThingsDone, but I know that if I came across a problem I wouldn't know where to begin to fix it. So I'm taking my own advice and starting from the beginning; reading the manual, setting up an test system, parsing simple files, getting input/output, getting it linked in with a web server... all part of getting to know my new environment.
What should every PHP programmer know ?
You need to know a language that is not PHP. I'm not saying you shouldn't develop your sites in PHP, it's actually really good for that, but you really need to know at least one other language to get some perspective.
Why? PHP is broken and full of bad design and misfeatures. You can write excellent code in PHP, but you're never going to be able to spot the bad design and failures of PHP itself if you don't know any better.
I'd suggest python, ruby, or C#
PS: If you don't think this is a helpful suggestion, then by all means downmod this answer, but if you are downmodding because you feel insulted by my claim that PHP is broken and badly designed, don't shoot the messenger, I'm just telling the truth!
First of all, that PHP itself IS a templating system
Security.
Just like Lucas Oman said - it is up to you in PHP to write the code well; and it does not coddle you. If you don't understand why you need to confirm a logout, or why you can't just validate in javascript, or why register_globals is bad - your app will be vulnerable in some form or another.
You need to learn the following (I would suggest in this order):
Basic Object-Oriented Principles (such as inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation)
The PHP language itself. Specifically, PHP 5.
Database Design Principles such as tables, keys, relationships, normalization, etc.
SQL - Structured (or Standard never can remember which) Query Language. Specifically learn the basics of select, insert, update, and delete queries.
Good design principles and coding practices (you can find posts here on StackOverflow for one) such as dividing presentation and business logic.
A Framework, Any Framework - this will help you become introduced to more advanced concepts of object-oriented design patterns and allow you to follow tutorials that will encourage good design and coding practices.
Object-Oriented Design Patterns like MVC, Database Abstraction Models and the like
Advanced SQL and other database stuff like triggers, stored procedures, and other functions.
Ignore the mysql_* functions. Not only do they provide no straightforward method of writing secure code, they actually go out of their way to make it painful and tedious if you try. Use mysqli or PDO instead (and you've got no excuse now - PHP 4 was end-of-life'd months ago).
All good answers, but there is something important missing: If you want to seriously get into PHP, then you should be aware that there are a lot of PHP programmers out there who are lazy, inept, ignorant, misguided and unfortunately get their code released to the public. The history of PHP means that it supports some questionable features (not just things like register_globals but also smaller things like automatic initialization) and people still use them. You don't want to.
I would say the most important thing is to learn how the whole process of building a page with PHP works - in that requests come from a client (web browser), hit the web server, get passed through to PHP, which then generates the response that is sent back. A solid understanding of this will ground you in
why you can't send headers after output has started
how sessions and cookies work
how each page should be built in a stateless manner (i.e. deliver whatever the request asks for, don't remember what happened last time, or guess what the user is doing)
The difference between HTML, PHP, JavaScript and CSS, and more importantly, what each is used for primarily and where the responsibility of each lies.
Once you've got that down, then you should be quite comfortable with writing any app. But unless you've got that down, you'll start mixing things as I've seen many rookies do before now.
That every value everywhere has to be encoded appropriately. echo $some_variable_that_seems_innocent is evil nine times out of ten.
Use htmlspecialchars() in HTML/XML, prepared statements or at least addslashes() when building SQL queries, json_encode() when inserting values into scripts, rawurlencode() when appending URL components, escapeshellargs() when constructing shell commands, etc.
If you insert text in URL that's part of a script in XHTML document, you'll need to encode data three times.
Although this isn't a technology, I think it's very important that you understand that, when using PHP, it is completely on you to write good code. PHP is capable of it, but it does not encourage it. You are completely responsible for writing code that is well designed and, if you choose, follows OO principles. You will have no help from the language.
Use a great IDE (like Eclipse for example) that let you debug and have some code completion. This will save you some time.
PHP have a lot of programmer and is very popular = a lot of thing is already done for you, before writing some code, doing a google search is always a good idea.
You should use some of the Framework if you start from scratch. This will answer all your question about AJax, template engines... because most of them come with these packages.
Here is some post about how to start choosing a framework: SO 1, SO2, Here is a list of PHP Framework.
You can develop PHP on Windows, Linux or Mac.
Getting a web server setup
To run PHP and MySQL locally on your computer you will need to install Apache webserver with php module and MySQL database server. ie. a LAMP webserver (Linux Apache MySQL PHP).
In the past, I would recommend installing Ubuntu. These days, there are a few solutions available that will give you one click installation webserver without using linux.
For Windows:
http://www.wampserver.com
For OSX:
http://www.mamp.info
After having a LAMP webserver use w3schools.com tutorials to start.
I would say a basic one would be HTML. ;)
No Php framework expert.As templating which make the system much complex then as it.
Understand business logic requirement and think the cons/pro.Hoping for SA to think all for you is not good programmer.
No ajax.I dealing with large of data,rendering to one js file about 4000 k data is very bad.
Start from notepad or VI
After learn php about 1 to 2 years,try learn other language like c# or c++ to improve your php application.
Php is addicted language rather then other language.You type it works.Other language,you type It's Compile It's Hang up.
7.For complexity application,php is the best to me rather then other language,because you think,you write it works.
You should know how to use effectively at least one Debugger/IDE. It is amazing what you can learn from your code by stepping through it and watching it run. It both makes it much simpler to track down bugs, and improves the quality of your code. I believe you should never commit code to a project that you haven't seen execute.
The PHP Language
Go to PHP.net and read through all of the documentation. When you are done, you won't know everything you need to know about php, but you will know where to look.
Be careful of code snippets you find on the web. Often they contain sql in html, which is bad practice, as well as security vulnerabilities such as sql injection. I've seen few that use prepared statements, which is good for security.
Personally, I found the book "Build your own database driven website using PHP and MySQL" extremely helpful.
Other than that, the one thing I found hardest to get used to with PHP is how relaxed it is, compared with any other language I've ever used. By that I mean no types, flexibility about syntax and punctuation. Personally I think that's a good thing, but I also know that it probably encourages pretty bad behavior.
Here's one other tip I have: try to use something like the DRY principle -- i.e., you'll find yourself writing the same little (or big) bits of code over and over again -- make them into functions as early as you can in the process of coding, and life will be a lot easier later on.