Re: PHP on .NET DLR

On Fri, Aug 10, 2007 at 08:59:24AM -0700, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:
> K T Ligesh wrote:
> 
> >  PHP on .NET has a 1000 reasons. Phalanger is already there. Why are you letting it die?
> 
> Personally because it doesn't solve any problem I have.  I build large
> scalable web sites. 

 It will. You should create a silverlight frontend for at least some of the yahoo interface. It will be interesting. It will be really nice if you can do it in PHP itself. I have checked the Phalanger examples, and it is extraordinarily trivial. I think writing a silverlight client for existing apps would be a matter of days work in PHP, especially if they are already ajax aware.

 Unless of course, yahoo has a strict No-MS policy, I think it wouldn't hurt Yahoo to have an optional fancy graphical frontend. Yahoo interfaces are very drab now. So maybe _yahoo_ will sponsor this? :-) hehe.



> But this is open source.  It doesn't matter what I
> think.  Open Source moves with the interest of the contributors.  If a
> couple of developers joined the project tomorrow to make PHP work great
> with Silverlight, then it would happen.  Just like how PHP got support
> for just about everything else.  Either an existing PHP developer needed
> it, or someone from the outside needed it badly enough to join the
> project and make sure it happened.  If either happens in this case, then
> PHP will get Silverlight support.

 You will be able to write silverlight client in PHP and stream the data from a linux/apache/php server.  and it can always be made optional. 

> 
> So, if you really want to see Silverlight support in PHP, you need to go
> looking for someone who is interested in volunteering their time to make
> it happen and remind them that PHP is a very open open source project
> and it really isn't hard to contribute to it.
> 

 It was there. PHalanger was working nicely, and I was planning on contributing once I could get my development environment--based on vim/screen/xterm/mutt--ported to windows, which became possible only with Vista. But the Phalanger devs got hired by MS, and then they were not allowed to work on the project, which is really strange, considering that MS has nothing to lose but a lot to gain from Phalanger. The problem is again that the situation is not neutral. If it was, then PHP was the first language on .NET, even ahead of python. Phalanger had it working much before the ironpython got their first production release out.

 And even now, there do exist a maintainer for phalanger, but it is not being taken seriously--in contrast to the enthusiasm that ironRuby has generated in the Ruby community. I can't still understand how a pre-alpha release of IronRuby is greeted much more enthusiastically, while the fully working phalanger is abandoned.

 What we need is to get MS let the old developers--Tomas and Lada--back to working on Phalanger. I am still trying to figure what actually made MS purposefully scuttle Phalanger by snatching the devs.