Have you ever hit an actual limit of php in web dev?

php

Solution

I've been working as a PHP developper (sometimes on projects not too small) for more than 3 years, and I have never really met anything that PHP wouldn't allow me to do.

Of course, you sometimes/always have to use several servers, some other piece of software (database, reverse proxy, cache, ...) ; but that's part of the game ;-)

Actually, the best thing about PHP is its "glue" nature : what PHP does is allow you to glue stuff together, to build your application using different components. And PHP does that really well.

Sometimes, you'd have to programm in C to code a PHP extension, to glue to something no-one else has ever used (there are a lot of PHP extension which do that already like mysql or curl, to say only two names) ; but there are so many extensions that already exist that I've never had to do that -- even if I'll probabaly do so one day or another, just for fun ;-)

An important thing to note is that there is probably always a solution to your problems :

- You're speaking about scalability ; what about caching ? using several servers ? using a reverse proxy ? PHP has no problem with that.

- And, as you can see on SO (and in so many places) : PHP has a great community !

If I had to think about one thing that PHP is not well suited for, I'd say "comet" : PHP model of one process per request is not good for long polling and the like...

PHP is not quite good for long running batches, too ; and you often have some of those alongside your web application ; and using the same language allows you to reuse code -- still, I've always found a (not too difficult) solution.

Oh, and I'd also say : PHP is great for web applications... But not that great when is comes to desktop applications -- even if it's possible (see PHP-GTK for example).

Problem

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