Why PHP?
Posted in Technicalon May 14, 2005
A lot of departments are using coldfusion for its web site developement. I’ve seen just a little bit of coldfusion code, and I’m impressed on how remarkably simple it looks. I can understand why its such an appealing platform for many departments across BYU. However, as long as I am webmaster, we will continue to use PHP for our primary website developement for a couple of reasons I think are really good.
Before I start though, I thought that I would express concern over how easy coldfusion seems. I am curious to know if the simplicity of coldfusion code (as I’ve seen in the Macromedia examples) limits in any way its abilities or functionality.
But now the reasons why we will continue working with PHP. The first, is that PHP is free and widely available. While spending the money on commerical products that works is not a big concern, using free software has some good benefits.
First, is that there are a lot of free packages and applications available for PHP that are only available because PHP is not a commerical application. These include blogging software, forum software, lots of database connectabiltiy, packages to assist in caching and cachemanagement, packages for an embedded wiki engine, templating engines, and so on and so on.
Free software also has the added advantage that more people have better exposure to it. When we hire students to do the programmming, who are constantly coming and going, it can be difficult to train them on new technologies. Therefore, it is important that we use technologies that they are already familar with. I see a lot more resumes with PHP on them, then I do with Coldfusion on them.
Even for the students who are hired with little PHP experience, it is easier to train them, I beleive, on PHP as long as they already have some general programming experience. Coldfusion may be easier to pick up for those who are mainly web designers, but I think PHP is easier to pick up for programmers. At BYU, there are a lot more programmers than those who are limited to web design.
The fact that PHP is easy to learn, is also why our attempt to use Java failed, not because Java isn’t easy to learn, but the whole Java web framework was confusing and difficult to understand how to get started. Even for those who know Java, knowing how to use it in a web environment was difficult to understand for us.
There seems to be a lot more documentation on the web for PHP than there is for coldfusion. Which means the students we hire who are not PHP experts, are more likely to find help with what they are doing on the internet with various online documentation sites.
Our student employees are also free to install and play around with PHP on just about any computer. On their mac, or home windows station, or whereever. The can experiment on their own without having to have access to an expensive production server.
So we will keep using PHP, just because it is easier to learn for our employees and requires less training. In corporate environments Coldfusion may be a good choice, but PHP is our choice, because we have a high turnover of students that we need something a little more common.
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