The same thing said in another way, open-source developers have to be self-motivating and not financially motivated, whom to those who need to be financially motivated appear to have a lack of commitment, seriousness, or education. But you are right that Sun could "take their Java and go home" and that no one in particular could do that with PHP.
ta0kira

There is nothing wrong with using php on the enterprise level (ie big companies) and php does commercial backers ( particularly the guys that write the compiler: www.zend.com).

The reason why some big companies would perfer to use Java is probably the same reason that a lot of companies use asp.net, they have most of there other systems running using Java, and it makes more sense to extend these apps with jsp then starting them over from PHP.

as any comp sci major can tell you, What it comes down to is the task at hand. If your creating a simple web app, i wouldn't see any reason to use anything other the php. However, if you are creating a huge application (or small application on various frameworks and for different purpose that ll need to communicate and assist each other) something like JSP would make sense.

I've scene and developed huge applications in php, so its scaling is not a problem. What it does lack though is being usefulla s a general language, for example i recently had to create a web spider and indexer and originally planned on doing the front end and backend in PHP, but when it came time to start coding and testing, the back end was quickly switched to Perl. But this doesn't mean perl is better then PHP either, I spent 6 years as a Perl programmer, then learned PHP and have never even thought of using perl for a web application again.

I've set up jsp before with tomcat, it wasn't all the difficult. Most server comes as pre configured LAMP servers so running (or installing) php tends to be simplifier, but JSP is not at all hard to configure and set up.


Dan

In a big-company / big-iron setting, "the web site" is usually just a portal to the software-stuff that actually runs the business. It therefore needs to "play well with others."

One of the erstwhile appeals of Java is that you can use it to create objects ("servlets") that can interact with your back-end systems, and having created them you can then deploy them ... in your public-facing website or elsewhere.

Sun take their java and go home... I didn't think that I would ever hear myself weighing in on Java's side, but is there a lack of committment behind java? I don't think so. There are too many academics who praise Java to the skies, too many firms that rely on Java and who would take over compiler maintenance in a twinkling of an eye if Sun looked like dropping it. Granted, there would be an audible clunk as java maintenance hit the floor, which wouldn't ever happen with PHP where there is a surplus of people trying to get into the elite ranks of the PHP maintainers (and can I have a badge with that too please?), but Java would be picked up again pretty quick.

Regards, Tichbein.

P.s. that is not to ridicule the PHP elite. They do a good job, hats off to them.

For scalabilty, Java dudes don't only use pure servlets, they use j2ee features such as EJB, JMS, etc. Most of the time you probably won't be using "pure" JSP or servlets too, but a framework such as Wicket, JSF, Struts or Spring.

Personally I would never use PHP for a high traffic website. Generally PHP programmers have bad programming habits(like average Visual Basic/ASP programmers) even if there are many good PHP developers. Most of PHP programmers I've met sucks or are "average programmers" (bad API design, etc.).

On lots of blogs I've seen post about how one learned to program better in PHP by looking at ruby on rails' code(I would say it's about time...).

In the business decision of "what language to use" for this-or-that project, we first must establish the simple observation that no programming-language tool is ipso-facto "better than" nor "worse than" any other.

As a practitioner in this curious craft, you must be fully prepared to "land four-paws-down" in whatever programming environment your employer|client may select, or have selected.

The reasons why said party may have made a particular choice at a particular time are legion ... and most clients actually have many technologies in-play at the same time. If your objective is to remain gainfully-employed, both with regard to present technologies and technologies that have not yet been invented, you cannot "pick sides." Instead, you must forever adapt.

SNOBOL, anyone? COBOL? SPL? Forth? Yep... still know 'em....