Hi Skunks and Nicholas, I highly disagree with you that PHP does not scale as well as JSP/Servlets - I will even go as far as to say that it scales better. That PHP does not scale / is enterprise ready is an old myth, one that most likely is a result of the fact that very few PHP applications are engineered with scalability in mind, or is just of poor engineering quality. Prime examples of PHP applications that scale very very well are Wikipedia & Facebook. The main difference is that PHP is stateless and JSP/Servlets is statefull. This leads to the fact that PHP applications (usually) is very easy to scale across multiple servers (i.e. scale very high) whereas JSP/Servlets (usually) is able to scale better when running on a single server - but often have a hard time running on multiple servers without considerable extra engineering. however bad design/engineering can ruin any chance of an application scaling - both with Java & PHP. Regards Michael Pedersen PLUSPEOPLE Nicholas Loki wrote:
Hi Skunks, Allow me to disagree with what comrade Saidi mentioned about over-engineering. I think in any enterprise system design a high degree of over-engineering is expected. Personally I would go with start simple but make sure your simple anticipates and expects features that may come up in later releases. About the language of choice, if you want fast turn around times for your development cycles together with ease of use PHP is the way to go. Though I still think it doesn't scale well under increased load. JSPs/Servlets scale very well under load, but are more complex to develop and maintain. Either way you need skills to achieve productivity with both approaches.
Another way to look at it is, you could use a hybrid approach and have PHP for the front end and JSP/Servlets for business logic etc in the back end. You could then use REST APIs or WebServices to pass messages back and forth within the architecture. A bit of an overkill, but might be the way to go with really high volume systems.
KR, Loki