Opening the Pandora's Box with PHP for Web 2.0

This session qualifies as the most interactive session of the day, and once again reminds us that the developer's world is so adorned with a multitude of options to do the same thing.

Well here, it was about PHP as against the J2EE stack, or .NET platform. Anuj Amit, the speaker's claim to PHP's web 2.0 fame was that the setup to host a PHP web application is less costly in terms of space.

I am totally PHP ignorant. But, this discussion, is rather enlightening since there are views that are poles apart. People are for the J2EE stack, specially for large complex applications and say that PHP can serve the smaller ones well. But the speaker vouches for the opposite, citing the example of Flickr.

Another dimension is that PHP is very easy to learn so much so that its impossible to judge a person's ability as a developer, basing it solely on PHP.

Also, when a technique is chosen over another, its not only because of the language itself or how cumbersome (or not) it is, but also about the tools that are floating around that help us use it. In this context Java has been around for donkeys years as compared to PHP which gives it an upper hand.

So...big discussion...the organizer actually had to come and control it in terms of time :)

But great! Made me pensive!