PHP and the reasons why we consider switching

PHP is a nice language, with numerous advantages :

  • Easy to learn

  • Easy to install and upgrade serverwise

  • Interpreted, so no compile and deploy worries

The disadvantages are starting to annoy me more and more over time :

  • Zend engine is huge. It's a major memory consumer

  • Not all extensions are stable. When it comes to thread safety, there are major problems

  • Some language constructs simply suck : __construct(), the 5.3 namespace seperator

  • No type hinting for build-in types (int, string)

  • No OO function overloading

  • Multibyte support is basically non-existent

Our current framework (I-Content) is based on PHP4 code, and therefore not object orientated. There are some improvements, but the PHP limitations don't go away. Our new framework is on it's way, and build using JAVA. The above limitations go away, althrough we get some new disadvantages in return. Time will tell if the switch is really going to happen…