I would like to put my two sense in because I have been doing extensive FreePascal Web programming, and I have to agree that FreePascal has a nice structure and PHP often can get quite ugly.
For many applications PHP is just fine. The points you guys are bringing up are good ones - like security with "text injections" possibly begin exploited with PHP and for rather large complex applications - things can get dicey in PHP - as far as hard to maintain and performance becoming an issue. But in all fairness - well written PHP can do many great things. PHP has many "features" that FreePascal doesn't, and FreePascal has many features that PHP doesn't. What is available for each will likely change over time. Personally, I'd rather have my FreePascal Syntax, smartLinking, Socket library, multi-threading library, ability to call dlls, inline functions, true object oriented binaries versus emulated OO script (Which is likely OOP underneath but it still parsed). I can write a desktop application, a web application, an embedded application, a database application, a daemon - all with one language. PHP was never designed to be quite this flexible. My point is, like Daniel said "Better learn a good language"; I'd rather learn a language I can use for anything - than another vogue special interest language only because you be a master in a couple things - but not in everything. FreePascal has all the power required to create any kind of application - therefore - I can ultimately do much more with it. I've written a CGI application in FreePascal that gets some performance gain over typical CGI from a file based IPC. The CGI app just passes environment and request info to the main multi-threaded database application, and then sends the output back to the client when the big application finishes its thread. The idea being a small CGI program that doesn't grow as the application grows - is better than the typical CGI app that gets bigger and bigger as it evolves getting slower all the time. CGI is very portable. Performance is decent for a CGI application. FastCGI and a stand alone server are the next additions to this model for performance reasons. PHP versus FreePascal: It's like an internal combustion airplane versus a Jet Airplane to me. You Might get the internal combustion airplane off the ground faster (PHP) but a Jet airplane will go farther and faster every time.(FreePascal of course). Seriously - with FreePascal I can write FastCGI that does what I want versus what is available for PHP, I can write to any protocol I want, and it simply has all the power I'll ever need - for any application. PHP is great also. I'll put my mmoney on FreePascal because it goes farther, faster, and can handle the long haul. Jason P Sage _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
