Me: Didn't they put PHP code right there in the HTML pages?
Nathan: They do.
Me: Didn't we say that's bad?
Nathan: Apparently they are doing alright. Lots of people are using WordPress.
Me: And look at us. We tried so hard to separate our stuff into layers and all that and still can't manage the complexity. We have so many frameworks yet not anything as popular as WordPress.
Nathan: Not everyone needs the scalability. How many hits can I get?
Brad: You are hosting your blog in Java, right.
Me: Yes. I use Pebble with Tomcat. I like it a lot. A well designed tag library is a joy to use.
But why is this? Why do people (at least some people) flock to something like PHP, which we Java people know is "bad" (or at least were told is bad)?
Could it be because that Java, although good, is too hard?
Could it be because Java is not available out of the box? (If you want to do ASP.NET, you get a Windows server. If you want to do PHP, you get a Linux server. If you want to do Java, you get a what?)
Could it be because the Java implementations on different platforms are incompatible? (What's the latest version of Java on Mac OS X? on Solaris 7? 8? 9? 10? on Free BSD? On AIX? HP-UX? Tru64)
Could it be because the Java stuff is too hard to set up right for end-users? True that I can setup Pebble in five minutes, but that's assuming I have a working Tomcat environment. And that is in itself a non-trivial task.
Could it be because what we have been told this past ten years were wrong. That PHP is really superior to Java?
Could it be because contrary to what we believed and what we've been told by our bosses, we aren't that bright, and couldn't see something that is so plain to the PHP product vendors and users. Doesn't that Joel on Software guy have a product that's ASP on Windows and PHP on UNIX? I wonder why he did not use Java?
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