PHP Zone - Comments for "Open-source Web applications, PHP vs. Java (Part 2 of 2)"

"I believe that it is only a

sgstefan — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 06:06:46 -0400

"I believe that it is only a matter of time until the effects are felt in the enterprise space: less enthusiastic Java specialists, less innovation, decreasing quality of products and so on. Some say that the effects are already present – what do you think?"

This implies that PHP stays still, but maybe PHP will evolve faster and surpass JAVA programming enviroment in next years. Who knows?

edvin@sysedata.no wrote:I

sky_HALud — Wed, 07 May 2008 10:14:49 -0400

edvin@sysedata.no wrote:

I agree it can be cumbersome when you just want "something small", but again - writing a few lines in pom.xml really isn't that big a deal, and as you mention - most providers have some kind of a base package that would be comparable to the stuff you get with PHP (atleast if you are writing JSP). I know that some users will still feel that way, and I absolutely think your approach with OSGi and Jetty seems very interesting.

We're exhibiting at JavaOne and our booth is near the Jetty guys. Today I'll drop by and have a talk with them regarding this issue.

edvin@sysedata.no wrote:

As a service provider I'd be willing to join in to experiment around this :) I believe the key to success is actually not just on the serverside - but on the client side as well, concerning deployment of the OSGi bundle. Most tools for creating jars and wars are rather dismal, and when you throw in the extra manifest info you need in the OSGi bundle, it is imperative that the end user experience is smooth for this to be successful.

If you need tools for creating OSGi bundles in general I think that Eclipse offers you the best support. With those you can work both on Equinox and pure OSGi bundles. We should not focus on these right now though. Instead, cheap and easy deployment of already bundled smaller Web projects should be our target.

edvin@sysedata.no wrote:

I could set up a Solaris Zone to play around with the concept if you/others would like to join in :)

Sounds cool. What exactly do you mean by a Solaris Zone?

Maybe it would be the best if we moved this discussion off the article comments. I set up a dedicated forum on small-scale Java hosting on the Numiton forums (registration required): http://www.numiton.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=7.

zynasis wrote:java hosting

sky_HALud — Tue, 06 May 2008 07:03:02 -0400

zynasis wrote:

java hosting is more expensive because the apps that typically on them are heavier and use more resources than php services.

i think the main reason theyre like that is because theyre bloated with far too much junk that comes "out of the box" with them.

cut this back and we've got a light weight easy to deploy service!

I used to think the same. I did set up a pretty thorough test though (see this post) with phpBB 2 and nBB2 (its direct Java equivalent). The result was that even lightweight Java apps do have serious hosting issues. The cheapest hosting option for Java was around 15$ with a private JVM having 32 MB max heap, but it already started to outperform the PHP option at 10 concurrent users.

I do think that a proper shared hosting solution coupled with some lightweight Java projects (migrated from PHP) can outperform PHP in both quality and costs.

I agree it can be cumbersome

edvin@sysedata.no — Tue, 06 May 2008 07:00:11 -0400

I could set up a Solaris Zone to play around with the concept if you/others would like to join in :)

edvin@sysedata.no wrote:With

sky_HALud — Tue, 06 May 2008 06:43:38 -0400

edvin@sysedata.no wrote:

With PHP, you get the provider's precompiled set of utilities and libraries bundled with PHP. This seems like a good thing at first, because you don't need to upload all your library dependencies yourself. But if you need a spesific version of say an XML parser, you might not see this as such a good thing, as your provider in most cases will be unwilling to update jus to satisfy your need.

Good point. Actually some Java shared hosting providers do provide preloaded libraries, but in JAR format so that you get one version available to you. Java already has a solution to this issue with OSGi bundles/plugins where you can have as many versions as you like and from the descriptors one can declare dependencies to specific library versions. There are most certainly solutions to this. It's just that Java shared hosting did not reach a critical point yet.

edvin@sysedata.no wrote:

When you buy a Java hosting solution, you can/must upload your own dependencies, I guess this is what you refer to as bloat. This gives you the opertunity to run with EXACTLY the same versions of your libraries both in local dev and in deployment. This is a HUGE advantage, and you don't need to waste time with adapting/bughunting because of version skews and API breaks etc.

Well, technically this is bloat if you want to host something small. There should be a way for non-technical people to be able to host Java apps just as easily as PHP ones. Maybe it would be worth experimenting.

I would be willing to throw in a dedicated server and attempt to set up a killer Java shared hosting solution (probably with OSGi and Jetty) just to show that it can be done effectively. It would have limited availability and would be free or extremely cheap - profits are irrelevant, I only want to prove things. All configuration details could then be made public so that others could follow. I think that would be a first for Java at least. Anyone interested in collaborating or using such a service?

With PHP, you get the

edvin@sysedata.no — Tue, 06 May 2008 05:29:54 -0400

With tools like Ant, Maven and Ivy, dependency management is easy and straight forward, and the extra upload sice really is not relevant, both because "everyone" have fast connections, and you don't need to upload your dependencies everytime you change your code :)

A Java process will ofcourse use more concurrent resources, as the the process is ALIVE all the time. This gives you incredible opertunities as a programmer, compared to a language where everything is parsed on every request - talk about wasting resources :) In our system, we see about 18MB usage for every new PHP process spawned (using suPHP), whereas every request to an already started Java container just uses the minimal memory needed to deal with the business-aspect of each request :)

java hosting is more

zynasis — Mon, 05 May 2008 23:31:20 -0400

java hosting is more expensive because the apps that typically on them are heavier and use more resources than php services.

i think the main reason theyre like that is because theyre bloated with far too much junk that comes "out of the box" with them.

cut this back and we've got a light weight easy to deploy service!

I think Java hosting is

dn68495 — Mon, 05 May 2008 01:22:40 -0400

I think Java hosting is actually a big problem. It is simply more expensive. Plus PHP hostings preinstall a lot of components for clients.

yes, you can.

dn68495 — Mon, 05 May 2008 01:20:43 -0400

yes, you can.

About the shared hosting

bosmeeuw — Fri, 02 May 2008 08:51:02 -0400

About the shared hosting problem (apps using resources even though they aren't getting any requests): Ruby on Rails had a similar issue where you needed "mongrels" running all the time, with a predetermined number of processes per web application. This has been solved beautifully by mod_rails / passenger; it keeps the Rails framework in memory, and "spins up" application instances as requests come in. It keeps the instance running until no requests have been made for a configurable period, with a configurable quota on the maximum number of instances. So no requests: no memory consumption.

Of course this approach is currently framework specific (only works with Rails), but java web deployment already has a standard mechanism (deploying WARs), so maybe a dynamic deploy/undeploy based on requests could be a nice solution. With this approach, the startup time of java web applications would of course have to be as low as possible so the visitor doesn't get a long delay when an undeployed application needs to be spun up.

When programming JSP, you

edvin@sysedata.no — Fri, 02 May 2008 07:56:33 -0400

When programming JSP, you get a similar execution model to PHP, where changes are reloaded on the fly.

To take full advantage of what Java has to offer for web-developers however, you would use a framework or a method that deals with Java-code that only to some extent can be reloaded on the fly. In your dev-enviroment, when running in debug-mode, some, but not all types of code can be reloaded on the fly. There are work under way to make even more code hot-replacable, though.

To some degree this is annoying when debugging an UI-issue for example, but for the most part you can afford a reload that only takes a few seconds and is a keystroke away after you have programmed for ten minutes and wants to see the results :)

I use Apache Wicket as a web framework, and the small amount of time I use waiting for server reloads is easily gained by ease and speed of development and robustity of the end result :)

-- Edvin

Apologies for misreading

skoop — Fri, 02 May 2008 07:22:34 -0400

Apologies for misreading Marco

I didn't say "production

kanji — Fri, 02 May 2008 06:42:58 -0400

I didn't say "production environment."

With a company I have developed some modules for Spring MVC and every time I had to redeploy in order to test (they did not use the JUnit). I wanted to know if is normal or if they did not know other solutions?

Marco: And this is the

skoop — Fri, 02 May 2008 05:21:05 -0400

Marco: And this is the difference between good developers and normal developers in a PHP environment.

A good developer knows that you should *never ever* modify your code on the production environment. Proper procedures should be in place.

Having said that, still for PHP you need not restart any services. You just deploy your changes to production and it's working. If I understand Java correctly, some processes need to be restarted for new deployments to take effect.

I'm php dev and I wanted to

kanji — Fri, 02 May 2008 05:01:07 -0400

I'm php dev and I wanted to ask to java dev:

in php if I must modify some project file I can make it in ssh, ftp or svn without need to touch other.

In java I can make the same things on the server without restart web container or redeploy to every modification?

thnx