NYCPHP Meetup

[felix zaslavskiy]

> Thank you guys for a whole slew of reference words to go google mad with.
> Do any of you have some good resoruces on threading, forking, daemons,
> etc?
> I've heard of these things before, but only in passing.  I'm gettign bits
> and pieces, but not enough to feel I 'get it'.

C use to be the predominant language of choice for server application. The
main reason is performance.  C++ and Java also are popular because they
can provide performance similar to C  but better at managing complexity.

As natural progression of things people now want to implement server
application in scripting languages because performance is not a probelem
anymore since machines are so much faster. Peoples time costs more then
hardware.  I think this is the right direction. We may not see apache
being replaced by an implementation in a scripting language maybe for
years it will happen eventually.

The question is which scripting language to use? In the begining php was
not intended to be used that way. It start out as a simple way to add
dynamic content to html. But people like php so much they want to use it
for everything.  This is why we have extensions that wrap basic system
function to give us a way to do anything with the language. Threading is
really central to some languages ex Java. In php it is not much important
except in situations where php runs as a deamon process. Php has not been
used that way in general but now it will be used because people like to.
Threading has been around for years except its new to php its not new in
general.

I am still not convinced PHP is the best scripting language for server
tasks. There is other options like Perl,Python,Tcl,Ruby etc. Those
languages were general purpose langs from the very begining.  I wonder
what other people think on this.


-- 
Felix Zaslavskiy
http://www.zaslavskiy.net