Serge's Technology View

This comes as a result of discussion in the newsgroups.

Is PHP slow or fast? Is PHP an advanced enough language to consider it to be a serious platform?

Well, accordingly to information available on PHP.NET web-site there are about 20,000,000 domains running PHP as of today.

http://www.php.net/usage.php

PHP is 5th popular language in the world after Java, C, C++ and VB. We cannot say the same about Delphi, which comes 13th:

http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm

There is more statistics here

http://www.nexen.net/chiffres_cles/phpversion/16990-php_statistics_for_april_2007.php

Well. Why question was raised?

There is this misconception about PHP not being serious enough language with luck of features and slow speed.
This is simply not true. Or: it is true about any language or software platform when it comes to implementation. Bad code can be written with any language. Some has better protection against bad practices (Hurray for Delphi and Pascal!!!) but it comes to knowing what you are doing.

Can you write better code with PHP? Definitely!

First, PHP is something which produces HTML for you, so make sure that HTML you are producing is fast. Can you use JS, CSS where appropriately? Use them. It will improve your visitor’s experience. Use cached pages. List might be endless here…

This is something to read about benchmark of PHP code and what to avoid.

http://php-mag.net/itr/online_artikel/psecom,id,546,nodeid,114.html

Also visit http://us2.php.net/tut.php and read around for good and bad practices.
Also see into using closest to newest version since your speed improvement will be significant

http://sebastian-bergmann.de/archives/634-PHP-GCC-ICC-Benchmark.html

I have personally running PHP based web-site since 1998. I can tell you that if there is a lousy code then there is lousy speed.

CG tem is continuing to do a great work.

Last night Nick has posted “small” review about work done lately by Documentation Team.

http://blogs.codegear.com/nickhodges/archive/2007/06/27/36554.aspx

In his post he did mention a secret location we all need to know. Keep it in your locked drawer…

http://cc.codegear.com/prodcat.aspx?prodid=1&catid=9

Marco in his blog brought very interesting point into discussion about future of VCL.
It is very good post (as usual) and I would recommend to read it when you have a minute.

But I want to look at VCL from the point of how big it affected Delphi.

What is Delphi and what is VCL? How close was their relationship over the years?
Is Delphi a VCL or is VCL a Delphi?

It is hard to determine what is primary and what is secondary. What was first chicken or egg? Sacramental question, isn’t it?

Let’s see… When Delphi 1 was introduced back in 1995 or even earlier when things just start to be put together in 1993, Borland Pascal and Borland Pascal for Windows were one of the major two products existed utilizing Pascal language.
So when Delphi 1 came along it first grabbed attention as being very reach environment to put visual UI in the simple click of the mouse. There was very small set of similar products on the market and it took years for Microsoft to bring Visual Studio on the same level.

What did make a Delphi being Delphi? Off course it was VCL model introduced. Not customizable much at first, but very easy and robust. So, if you weren’t C person and were using Pascal in any form, it did become your love at first sight.

I do not think there is a simple answer what is first and primary Delphi or VCL. Delphi is VCL and VCL is Delphi. You cannot separate them nor can you replace one of them. I like Chrome project, but this is not Delphi and never will be. It is extended Object Pascal. I like an approach though.
Same is for FP or any other similar projects.

If you do not have VCL then don’t try to say it is like Delphi.

Another thing to remember is that many things in current IDE is written in Delphi using VCL. Try to “hack” class model of the IDE – it all starts from TApplication.Mainform and you can draw a full tree of IDE infrastructure. So there is no Delphi IDE without VCL either even with all this .Net code imbedded.

Commenting on my prior post about VCL 2.0, I want to emphasize that VCL should not be considered to be removed to get multi-platform support, but should be enhanced to work on all platforms. That in the most part will make IDE multi-platform as well by nature. If first edition of VCL 2.0 will include all required components which are needed for IDE, then most likely it will cover major points in creating any UI software. Then it can be easily extended with all other stuff like DB and Web access.