This article on the lousy XML "Book Business" mentions a Tim O'Reilly comment vis-a-vis PHP vs. Perl. It's for this Reilly (William) yet another clue as to why a look into PHP may well be in order. Hmmm. Sounds good.
Time to catch a boat (one among several boats).
Wm.
XML.com: The XML Book Business [Oct. 29, 2003]
Hi Martin, (my e-mail to Martin)
Hmmm. Another quote encountered telling me there's something interesting going on with PHP, again, something I'd kind of totally ignored. Hmmmm...
Maybe I oughta pursue that chapter on putting PHP together with MySQL from that book I'd borrowed from the library, after all... (Need to find the time!)
Cheers,
William
P.S. You'll find this e-mail up in my blog :^)
Quote:
"in fact, Tim O'Reilly seemed to admit at a FOO Camp presentation that O'Reilly had missed the PHP boat, something others have been saying too."
"The XML Book Business"
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/10/29/deviant.html
Longer excerpt:
"Indeed, the XML book business is fairly grim across the board, not just for O'Reilly.
That's an important point to think clearly about in my view. After all, O'Reilly as an organization is far from omniscient; ...>> in fact, Tim O'Reilly seemed to admit at a FOO Camp presentation that O'Reilly had missed the PHP boat, something others have been saying too.<<... In that case, of course, it was a tricky thing to see, especially for O'Reilly, which has put a ton of effort behind Perl. It particularly tried to pitch Perl as something other than a language for writing cgi-bin Web applications. That must have made PHP's success as a kind of Perl++ in that particular space hard to see coming. One of the most common ways in which people and organizations err is zigging when a zag would have worked better.
So [anyway] the first point is that everyone's XML book business is in the dumper. ..."
Posted by William in category: Web at November 3, 2003 10:13 AMI don't think the various Reillys' are the only ones to have missed the PHP boat. It's one of those things that started so simply... a tool written in C by a guy that wanted to "spruce up" his web site, circa 1994! At the time, CGI was the hot new thing, and although Perl is the first thing that comes to peoples minds when thet think CGI, most CGI at the time was written in C. This was a natural partner for the early web servers ( e.g., NCSA server, infant Apache ), which were also written in C.
PHP quietly grew, over-shadowed by Perl, then further pushed from the spotlight by Java.
To be fair though, PHP lacked a lot of features for some time, in comparison to Perl and Java. This changed with PHP4, which introduced many new internal tools. Now, PHP5 appears to be going whole-hog, Object-oriented, supporting classes, inheritance via interfaces, exception handling, and a raft of other modern features.
This, coupled with its relative ease of use in terms of the crucial "getting up and running quickly" makes it an excellent choice for a wide variety of projects.
Anyway, to my point. A certain technology/marketing agency that shall remain anonymous, seems to have missed the boat as well. Perhaps this will change, as I have been suggesting it as an alternative to Perl or J2EE. We shall see!
Posted by: Martin at November 3, 2003 11:34 AMHi Martin,
Thanks for your blog comment!
And yes, good luck with bringing another (highly interesting) option forward in your dev. shop: PHP in addition to J2EE, Perl.
A 'PHP' web-surf around Amazon just now led me to the following "Guide" and a Review.
The Guide speaks of the ideal "children's [level] book" to learn PHP (good :^)), and the Review calls PHP the "perfect language [for certain web stuff]" (sounding pretty good, too ;^)).
Wm.
Hmmmm, Maybe I Can Do This? (and do so Quickly!)
=========================================
(IMO), Best Amazon "Guide" to PHP Books, written by a non-programmer type:
http://tinyurl.com/tgmi
"When I started to learn PHP last autumn (2002), I needed to understand it quick and to start programming immediately: I am a web designer (not a programmer) and a customer that I did not want to lose needed a database driven website. What does a professional do in that situation? Say he can do it and promise to finish it by the end of the week, of course. And then an endless time of work, eat, sleep, work began ..."
PHP + XML? I'm Getting More Interested...
V. Favorable Review, from I.B.M.!(?)
(and 1 Used copy @ $11 bucks)
=========================================
Professional PHP and XML (Wrox, 2002)
An Amazon Review, from someone at I.B.M. (read on!)
http://tinyurl.com/tgo5
"Smart, Innovative and Effective, August 9, 2002
Reviewer: Dr. Joseph Dreury from Armonk, NY
This book offers an incredible guide and reference to everything you can do with XML and PHP. Not only does this book cover the fundamentals of XML, such as SAX, DOM, XPATH and XSLT, but it covers rich topics like Apache Xindice, advanced XML storage techniques, XML-RPC, SOAP and a variety of both functional and object-oriented approaches to all these concepts.
At IBM, we have always been a strong advocator of PHP for being the perfect language for connecting to databases over the web and offering dynamic content and services. It's simple, elegant, easy and effective. Even further, IBM has always explored XML within PHP and has advocated the use of PHP with our DB2 product."
Update: Tutorial (with source code) on a rudimentary CMS with PHP + XML:
http://www.sitepoint.com/print/1165?SID=b65e165212b34be4636dee7c35dac0e7