Php?

[keethrus]

Im a little confused by reading people here who program actual games, 100% completed games, but yet say they don't know much about PHP or are afraid to mess with it.

Since I'm a big fan of PHP, let me just say the following:

1) If you can program a game in C or C++, you have 10 times the knowledge and experience necessary to program in PHP.

2) PHP is a C-like scripting language, only simpler than that.

3) You can do anything (including taking over the world) with PHP. Just goto PHP.net and browse their functions. Pretty much anything you want to do is just a function call away.

4) Connecting to MySQL and running queries is extremely simple. one function call to connect, another to query, another to get the results, another to close the connection. And they all start with, you guessed it, "mysql_".

5) PHP's variables are typeless, they can hold numbers, text, anything. It's super easy messing with them.

Im a total advocate for PHP. It's just too efficient and powerful to not use, and it's a piece of cake to pick up.

Just wanted to persuade as many people as possible to how great PHP is!

- Jeremiah

[oNyx]

>5) PHP's variables are typeless, they can hold numbers, text, anything. It's
>super easy messing with them.

Heh. Yea... the biggest "wtf" so far was === and !==

[Rainer Deyke]

PHP is one of those language that makes me cringe every time I see it, but I use anyway. Sorry, but a language where a["05"] and a["5"] refer to the same element is not something that I will use when there is a reasonable alternative.

[keethrus]

PHP is one of those language that makes me cringe every time I see it, but I use anyway. Sorry, but a language where a["05"] and a["5"] refer to the same element is not something that I will use when there is a reasonable alternative.

reasonable alternative? Please don't tell me you're thinking ASP!

[Yossarian]

Its all about Cold Fusion =)

Of course, being a forum of cheap indie peeps, I'm sure that "not for free" is a serious downside...

CF was powerful to do the entire All Out War: 4025 game in.

[beenThereDoneThat]

As someone who has spent the last seven years developing server-side software for large projects using ColdFusion and PHP, I can say that I much prefer PHP, warts and all.

There is nothing quite so frustrating in this kind of development, imho, as looking through pages and pages of complex ColdFusion code, especially someone else's code, trying to suss out the logic or find particular relevant portions. The tag based syntax is great for simple to mid-level development, but beyond that, it is just a nightmare. Well, that's my opinion, anyway. Of course, anyone can make code in any language that is dense and incomprehensible, but I find that ColdFusion seems to lull many developers into a false sense of security about code complexity. However, I will admit that PHP's wide adoption has made it easy for any joe blow to write some crappy PHP code and post it to someone's repository somewhere. You need to be selective when using third party PHP libraries, more so than for ColdFusion. But I think good, experienced developers are more productive and write cleaner code with PHP.

PHP definitely has it's issues, but overall I find it a joy to work with for server-side development. The logical progression of PHP code is much easier for me to follow, especially when dealing with large systems. The new object oriented improvements in PHP 5 are a welcome development, though not necessary if you prefer a more procedural approach.

Most of the developers I have worked with who have said they prefer ColdFusion over PHP, have been working with it for anywhere from 1-3 years. Most of the "veterans" I know prefer PHP.

Just my two cents.

[Yossarian]

Going on 6 years here...

Obviously this comes down a lot to personal preference. I've worked on quite a few large and complex projects in CF, and I personally find the tag structure very easy to go through. All of this is assuming some decent attempt at formatting though...

I don't really have an issue with PHP either, although I still some of things, like having to declare conns, run the sql, and then close them, are a lot more tedious than in CF, and just like in CF, PHP can get awful obfuscated and tags can blend in to the overall easily if a little effort isn't taken to code neatly.

In most cases it comes down to money. PHP is obviously free, Cold Fusion isn't, but is meant to work in a more enterprise enviroment. Both have large user groups and a good amount of support.

You need to be selective when using third party PHP libraries, more so than for ColdFusion.

^ That right there can be a little bit scary though, as spending lots of time trying to gleen the good from the bad isn't good for productivity either.

[beenThereDoneThat]

Yep. A lot of this comes down to a developer taking the time to make his code easy to read, no matter what language it's written in.

Very often PHP and ColdFusion are used in high pressure/high volume environments. When there are multiple clients breathing down the necks of management, and management is putting heavy pressure on the developers, the code almost always suffers, ColdFusion, PHP, or otherwise.

It takes a certain level of self assurance on the part of a senior developer to manage the managers and to make sure spaghetti is for dinner after a productive day's worth of coding, and not in the code itself...

As far as third party libraries for PHP: I think the situation has drastically improved over the past couple of years, so it is only a minor issue now, not a big ol' boogie man.

[DangerCode]

reasonable alternative? Please don't tell me you're thinking ASP!

Is there a reason why ASP is so bad?

(Please forgive me, I haven't done any web programming)

[Yossarian]

My worst complaint is a brutal syntax that is extremely hard to read and decode. It really gets lost in the code, and is not nearly as descriptively named function-wise.

I haven't used .NET, yet, but prior versions of ASP were also slow and just generally cumbersome to code.

[Rainer Deyke]

reasonable alternative? Please don't tell me you're thinking ASP!

I've already stated that I use PHP, right? That means that I am not aware of any reasonable alternatives. Perl is a mess and doesn't have the HTML integration thing. ASP is, well, ASP. Python would be great but it isn't widely supported by webhosts and it also doesn't have the HTML integration thing. So basically I'm stuck with PHP for now.