[WikiEN-l] Re: Learn PHP

Fri Nov 19 09:12:36 UTC 2004

Sheldon Rampton wrote:
> With just a few lines of code you can create an interactive 
> form that queries a database and returns a result. To do the same 
> thing in Perl, you'd typically need one static HTML page and a 
> separate page for the CGI script that processes the form data and 
> returns the result. It can be done, but it's more work. Once I 
> discovered PHP, I stopped using Perl and haven't looked back.

I can imagine there are situations this is a reason to use PHP.
I don't see how MediaWiki is one, though. Isn't MediaWiki trying to be a
solid, well-designed, large and scalable application? It takes time to
write such a thing. Probably more in PHP than in languages designed for
(among other things) such tasks. A well-designed application seperates
interface and implementation, which requires a good templating system. I
believe Ruby on Rails is such a thing (www.rubyonrails.org), but being a
Pythonista, I'm not sure. Development speed is a good thing. At the cost
of scalability, however, it is not.

regards,
Gerrit Holl.

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