CF, PHP and programming philosophy

[Eric Hellman]

It's dangerous to call things like PHP "progressive". That's a 
politically charged term; from the developer perspective, the PHP 
design is not  progressive the way its development process is.

Modern application development orthodoxy demands separation of code 
from data. Applied to web development, the content of a site should 
be separate from the code that generates it, and from the styles that 
format it. If you switch from MySQL to Postgres or you switch the 
scheme of your database, you shouldn't have to change all your web 
pages. If your area code changes, you shouldn't have to recompile 
your applications.

When development is done in teams, code/data separation becomes 
essential. Very few good programmers are good web designers, and vice 
versa.

In designing something like CF or PHP, many decisions have to be made 
about where to draw the line in these separations. Anything can be 
misused, and a designer has to decide how strongly to discourage 
misuse. To my mind, PHP looks too much like programming to be 
web-designer friendly. That's not to say you can't use it in a 
disciplined way to facilitate team usage, but discipline isn't always 
fun. Although I've not used it, the CF design looks modern, and web 
designers I've talked to love it.

In the end, we decided to roll our own Java-oriented framework. 
Doesn't do much, but it's fast. It's LGPL'd in our Jake package.

Eric
Eric Hellman
Openly Informatics, Inc.
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