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List:       php-general
Subject:    Re: [PHP] What's up with Quercus?
From:       Nathan Nobbe <quickshiftin () gmail ! com>
Date:       2011-05-28 20:59:55
Message-ID: BANLkTikg1h3k8KdDUF1pEWe2yhvE1zbHYw () mail ! gmail ! com
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On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 11:52 PM, Arnold Hesnod <ahesnod@mindvox.com> wrote:

> Although I've been mostly using Java and Ruby in my professional software
> development work for the past decade or so, in the past two or three years
> I've started to do more and more PHP.  I originally started using PHP
> because I needed to set-up and customize Drupal for a project.  Although as
> a programmer I've come to feel comfortable writing PHP code, I still don't
> feel like I have a good sense of where PHP is going as a platform and what's
> it's future is.  As the Drupal site has continued to grow both in terms of
> features and usage, it's become clear that this is something that I need to
> research and educate myself about.
>
> That led me to give a closer look at Quercus, the implementation of PHP 5
> that runs on top of the JVM.  I'd already heard about it somewhere along the
> line, but it's only in the past couple of weeks that I've actually pulled it
> down, read through the documentation and some of the source and tried it
> out.  So far I'm pretty impressed and enthusiastic about it.  The
> cancellation of PHP 6 combined with the steady trickle of PHP-related bugs
> and security vulnerabilities that have become public over the past few years
> had made me very nervous about the future of the platform.  Having an
> open-source implementation of PHP that runs on the JVM, which is like the
> gold standard for server application performance and reliability, is
> reassuring.  The fact that it makes it easy and fast to use the huge library
> of Java frameworks out there in your PHP applications doesn't hurt either.
>

first off quercus is not 'the' implementation of php running on the jvm,
it's 'an' implementation.  ibm project 0 is another

http://www.projectzero.org/

and there may be more.  also, java is fast, but php applications can be made
fast as well, when it comes to serving web pages.  there are times when i
would consider implementing some domain logic in something like java for
speed, but for delivering applications on the web, php is very useful and
practical in terms of performance.


> Although I've had great results so far in my experiments with Quercus, I'm
> curious to hear about other PHP developers' experiences with it.  Even
> though it seems like a significant number of people are using it for
> production applications, I'm curious why it's adoption isn't even higher
> than it is?  Given the difficulties of writing a Virtual Machine, it seems
> like leveraging the JVM is a no brainer.  Is there some technical drawback
> that I'm unaware of or is it just a case of inertia?
>

a lot of projects are mating their favorite language w/ the jvm which does
seem like a great idea, but one of the main drawbacks is the pace of feature
additions w/ the 'real' version of the project.  when i looked into quercus
a few years ago there wasn't support for things like spl and i'm not sure
where they stand w/ 5.3 features like closures and namespaces. not only that
but on any given minor release of php where is the parallel from quercus.
 also, the professional version of resin costs money.

these are probly the main reasons why the resin community isn't blowing up.

-nathan


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