An old 2006 post ..to remember

Here is what I thought on J2EE and PHP in 2006 :) 4 years ago:




Hello
I used to develop with PHP because I had no J2EE tech experience.
I wanted to develop something fast .. with PHP it really worked (I was in my 4th year at the university)-and I am thankful for that ...
as I had a strong C background then.
At my previous work place I was employed as a Java web programmer but then forced to switch to PHP because they said that J2EE was not worth it
... thinking back about the bussiness I would agree now .
Let me tell you why I moved to J2EE
1) I have a BsC in CS and PHP programming has no methodology attached(I would like to see some design methodology applied to PHP but can't)
, no patterns that you can use as guideline .. except when you already know them from other languages and implement them willingly .. .that's not always the case.
2) When my ex-boss gave me the specifications for a new project they where so scarce that it all sounded like monkey bussiness ..
do something that looks good and it's simple (easy to say for the boss). I had to reuse code from the existing codebase (written in a spaghetti form) but using
the high-tech method copy-paste (or monkey see -monkey do).
3) Being a PHP programmer .. as amazing as it is for a beginner in programming languages is seen as an underqualified job for a person with a BsC in CS and you are
paid accordingly : I now earn 70% more as a beginner web programmer in J2EE then as a PHP experienced (3 years) programmer.- I learned patterns .UML , EJB , algorithms ,OO tehniques and stuff that a PHP programmer does not need to care about.
As a PHP programmer I had difficulties explaining why we should use Smarty at my work place .... they thought it was a waste of time to separate bussiness logic from presentation .. and stood by the idea until I left (I used to develop my code with OOP when posissible and they called the best thing for code reuse indentation(to copy-paste it better).
4)Bussiness applicationes (E-Bussiness) demand the use of J2EE desperately .. PHP is really behind here.
Of course if I want to develop some blog site it would be ok to use PHP and Apache2 and place it on my old k6-II server with a MySQL support.
But ... if I want something like E-bay or Amazon .... I can't even think about the complexity involved with PHP.
As a hobby or as freelancing PHP rocks ... just don't use it for bank operations
PS : What really amazed me was when some of my colleaques presented their graduate projects (with advanced software engineering tech involved) in PHP
while I struggled to develop it in Java (without EJB it's true) - they have done a nice job and followed rules from SE ..
but for me PHP was not even on the list for a serious project.


For the record this post was also written on my old Thinkpad .. I love the machine if only it would be reliable.