Re: PHP on .NET DLR

I agree with K T Ligesh.

Ruby (and it's "on Rails") are growing very fast and may really be a
competitor with PHP today. Actually, I don't see why people doesn't link the
idea to port it to DLR. IMHO, looks like that childish war "Windows X
Linux", "Microsoft X OpenSource".

Best regards,
Rodolfo Andrade

----- Original Message ----- 
From: K T Ligesh
To: Andi Gutmans
Cc: Mike Schinkel ; [email protected]
Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2007 11:16 AM
Subject: Re: PHP on .NET DLR


On Wed, Aug 08, 2007 at 10:03:58PM -0700, Andi Gutmans wrote:
> I believe they hired the Phalanger guys:
> http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=Phalanger
>
> Andi
>

 So would zend or MS undertake the effort to port Phalanger to the DLR?
Again, the work is almost completely finished, all that's needed is to port
it to DLR. I personally think that the lack of silverlight support can be
severely damaging to PHP, and PHP-Siliverlight actually only has benefits.
PHP/Ruby/Python are never going to be full fledged members of the MS clan,
and for an enterprise, it would always be better to use pure-php-interpreter
for their backend php programs.

 But with php on silverlight, we get the option to write silverlight client
in PHP and then use the pure PHP backend on linux and windows. So at least
for clients who are using the MS windows based browsers, all Linux PHP
programmers will be able to deliver rich graphics if they want to. We will
finally have linux/apache/php delivering full multi-media streams to windows
clients, all in PHP. I would surely think that Zend only has to benefit in
such a scenario.

 Yes, there might be some small short term monetary losses for zend since
some people might use .NET to deploy PHP and may not use Zend's services,
but again my personal experience is that, if someone has a real PHP
application, using anything other than the orthodox PHP interpreter on
Windows/Linux is a folly. Especially considering all the dependencies and
the complexities.

 Ruby (now with silverlight support) is the most serious competitor to PHP
at present. This is not merely my personal opinion, but rather just look at
all the buzz generated by ironRuby. And if php won't catch up, it will
definitely lose. At least, I personally would switch to ruby, even though I
don't like languages that do not have curly braces everywhere.