Dude you are so lame and it's obvious. Half-baked PHP script-kiddie pounding his chest speaking amongst software programmers/developers.

What kind of script monkey will be trying to make a point with a shopping cart - something that has been coded and recoded in so many ways? Do a search of Google if you can.

Meanwhile, solve the BP algorithm problems. I really dare you. I know it's wicked knowing you only know how to connect a form to a database (and then pound your chest proclaiming yourself a guru).

BTW I solved the problems in Java and Rhino Javascript. I hope that motivates you to go learn the basics of programming. There is more to programming than forms on a web-page and database.

candylips:

Yes it is true that sometimes you can't aviod re-inventing the wheel but i think some of the better generic open source tools out there these days are flexible enough for you be able to customize to a specific requirement if required

You are right about the learning curve required in learning how to extend some of these tools but once you pass the initial curve i think you will be fine.

The good thing about these tools is that it is developed by a community of developers so it would probably have been thoroughly tested (at least the very good ones with an active community) and if you get stuck with a problem you have people who will be willing to help you out

Downsides to doing your own thing is that you have to go through many cycles of testing to ensure that the software is doing what it is supposed to do. Fix little niggly bugs and all

I believe in open source.

If you get to discuss custom projects with companies then you will see where over reliance on already existing software may boomerang.

I was once recommended to one oil servicing firm here in Lagos concerning a CV, recruitment and project tracking software. I was informed by the company that they had rejected two off the shelf software solutions after seeing the demos by some IT firms. They only made this information available to me because I refused to do a demo without being paid as I made it clear that free demos don't make any sense.

At the end of the day a custom solution was built for them meeting all the requirements they brought to the table and they have been using the solution.

The only reason why I was confident on being able to deliver was because I understand the building blocks of programming and could turn whatever business process into code. I wouldn't have been able to do this with off the shelf products even if it meant tweaking a few codes here and there.

Sure. A custom built solution was more relevant to that use case.

My open source debate was actually related to the e-commerce thing.

candylips:

Sure. A custom built solution was more relevant to that use case.

My open source debate was actually related to the e-commerce thing.

No wahala. Enjoy the weekend and take care.

Oh boy, this Logica guy proud no be small o!

LOL

Seun:

You don't need a fast language for ecommerce websites. The database does most of the work.

Banking is more than ecommerce. I mean you can script a simple ATM-like program that does simply data retrieval and display with that but when it comes to actually doing some heavy work that requires heavy work, I doubt php or any scripting language can hold.

this is my post

let me ask ya, how long will it take a team of 5 java developers to deliver a the simplest shopping cart website in terms of hours?
compare that to what it will take 1 php developer to do same

in terms of productivity, php wins, python rules

this is the post that followed by Afam

Exactly.

I can build a complete shopping cart system with product inventory and order management system in hours because I trust PHP to deliver. Over 70% of web applications out there in the world run on PHP and that is neither a coincidence nor a joke.

see your post, slowpoke

LOL!

Shopping cart? Who still codes those these days? That's so '97. How many Java-based free open-source frameworks with shopping cart functionality are out there? Literally hundreds, but I'll mention 1 - OfBiz.

abeg, who say make u mention one?

Kobojunkie:

Banking is more than ecommerce. I mean you can script a simple ATM-like program that does simply data retrieval and display with that but when it comes to actually doing some heavy work that requires heavy work, I doubt php or any scripting language can hold.

then you haven't gone far with php, most times, all these tasks depends on how you design your database.
world bank uses php to answer queries sent to their server

http://digitalmedia.worldbank.org/api/tutorial/tutorial.php

Kobojunkie:

Banking is more than ecommerce. I mean you can script a simple ATM-like program that does simply data retrieval and display with that but when it comes to actually doing some heavy work that requires heavy work, I doubt php or any scripting language can hold.

Can anyone state what the heavy work that requires heavy work mean here because the rate at which we put down meaningless statements just to sound knowledgeable is getting out of hand.

What is this heavy work that is being referred to here?

@Afam you need to know that there are heavy works that are very very heavy

@kobo, there is nothing like heavy work, na keyboard we go use solve am


programming is not rocket science only that very part you refuse to learn.
-Oluwaseun

webdezzi:


@kobo, there is nothing like heavy work, na keyboard we go use solve am

Well, when it comes to software, there is HEAVY work and then light work. That is why there is the push for highly scalable apps, to name a few.

mavenbox:

Oh boy, this Logica guy proud no be small o!

LOL

.

mavenbox:

Oh boy, this Logica guy proud no be small o!

LOL

Absolutely. Now go tell all you know. "Logica is a very proud guy".

webdezzi:

. . .
then you haven't gone far with php, most times, all these tasks depends on how you design your database.
world bank uses php to answer queries sent to their server

http://digitalmedia.worldbank.org/api/tutorial/tutorial.php

I laugh in binary.

Afam:

Can anyone state what the heavy work that requires heavy work mean here because the rate at which we put down meaningless statements just to sound knowledgeable is getting out of hand.

What is this heavy work that is being referred to here?

PHP does have its place and can be a wonderful tool, but only for websites that are lightly stressed. I do not expect any bank to run its internet banking site with PHP, the same for media streaming code, Massively Multiplayer Game sites etc. The main reasons are is inherently insecure, has very poor performance, has relatively poor floating point math, is not close enough to the metal (too high level) and not very object oriented (being so old and un-updated).

For a performance comparison see http://www.misfitgeek.com/pages/Perf_Stat_0809.htm
Parent page here http://misfitgeek.com/blog/aspnet/php-versus-asp-net-ndash-windows-versus-linux-ndash-who-rsquo-s-the-fastest/

Beaf:

I laugh in binary.

surprised why worldbank uses php?
it's because it will get the job done without issues same way ur compiled language will.

it all depends on the programmer.

webdezzi:

surprised why worldbank uses php?
it's because it will get the job done without issues same way your compiled language will.

it all depends on the programmer.

Even if it is the case that the WorldBank website uses PHP, you are still missing the point here. The worldbank website we see online does not handle the same processing requirements as bank sites such as chase.com or citibank.com, let alone process half of the requests and transactions those sites handle every second each day. Note this is not about number of requests but actual heavy work required in the back to produce data to be served to customers in next to realtime.

^
Exact reason why I laughed.

speed .net, java is greater than php, python,
That's the reason we have so many php accelerators and also while the authors of python recommend python as a prototyping language. If more speed is needed we use pyrex etc. Nevertheless, you can always add more ram or, in web jargon, more servers etc.

In real life speed is mostly a factor not to consider.

Wow! All the leading lights of the Politics section apparently are involved in programming, one way or the other.
Nice to see you guys conversing in a less volatile topic from the usual what's wrong with Nigeria.

@Topic: For me, I tend to think more in terms of the development environment rather than the language, since more of the 4GLs you guys are discussing are based on C and C++ compilers. Difficult for me to think of php/ajax and scala or Python, Javascript or Perl as 'programming languages', rather I think they're tools for the web.

A guy developing for the enterprise, say in an AIX environment, would be doing, say, J2EE or C++ in a Rational or Eclipse Environment, with Websphere. I started in a Sybase shop (Adaptive Server, PowerJ/PowerBuilder, Jaguar), and you could basically code in a Windows environment and compile for deployment to AIX or Solaris environments. But the underlying code was written in C++, PowerScript (PowerBuilder's own scripting language) and Java 2 Enterprise. The IDE had all sorts of amazing components that you could deploy to web and desktop environments easily - and they were all either C++ COM objects or Java classes.

Afam:

What is this heavy work that is being referred to here?

Parallel and Grid Computing is an area that i have been invloved in recently that requires a lot of "heavy work".

An example is implementing Monte Carlo simulations algorithims in a Grid or in parallel on a multi core server

Here is a wiki definition of what Monte Carlo is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method

So let me give you an idea of how this works in our case. We do have a website and while this could be developed in PHP( ours is in Java) we have a seperate infrastructure handling all these "heavy work " in the back end.

Am not gonna bore you with the technical details but these back end "heavy work" requires working with hundreds of thousands of market data and performing some sort of Stochastic/Probabilitistic modelling on them.

Btw this back end infrastructure is developed in the fastest langugue possible (C++ in our case) because it is so crucial that we extract,  and react to data as fast as possible

candylips:

Parallel and Grid Computing is an area that i have been invloved in recently that requires a lot of heavy work.

An example is implementing Monte Carlo simulations algorithims in a Grid or in parallel on a multi core server

Here is a wiki definition of what Monte Carlo is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method

So let me give you an idea of how this works. We do have a website and while this could be developed in PHP( ours is in Java) we have a seperate infrastructure handling all these "heavy work " in the back end.

Am not gonna bore you with the technical details but these back end "heavy work" requires working with hundreds of thousands of market data and performing some sort of Stochastic/Probability modelling on them.

Btw this back end infrastructure is developed in the fastest langugue possible (C++ in our case) because it is so crucial that we extract, and react to data as fast as possible

it again depends on how the fastest language was used by the programmer.

an instance is with the interswitch gateway,
they have a default script they give to users to use to connect to their servers


#NOTE:some variables have been removed#

$webpay_response =getTransResponseCode(getStatus() );
$amt_conf = getTransResponseAmount( getStatus() );

while this code works fine, there is an issue

getstatus() does the actual work of retrieving contents
I will rather store getstatus() value in a variable and then pass the variable to getTransResponseCode() and getTransResponseAmount()
like this

the above code will retrieve the same thing twice, multiply that with the number of requests daily.





My bottomline is that, no matter what language we code in, we may be able to code in a much slower language and still beat faster languages.
better still we may be able to tradeoff the speed in some other areas, like optimizing DB

@webdezzi.

If you looked at my post more carefully you will see that i said we have a web front end for this and it surely can be built in PHP but i have provided an example of what  "heavy work" means.

Monte Carlo simulations has nothing to do with Databases.

you seem to think all progamming applications are database driven. This is a capital NO

It is pure[b] hard core [/b]algorithm design.

C++ has the best and fastest inbuilt Mathematical and Statistical functions

What you do in Monte Carlo has a lot to do with breaking down a very large dataset into smaller chunks which can then be computed in a Grid or in Parallel and then merged back together. This is a very computationaly intensive work.

candylips:

@webdezzi.

If you looked at my post more carefully you will see that i said we have a web front end for this and it surely can be built in PHP but i have provided an example of what  "heavy work" means.

Monte Carlo simulations has nothing to do with Databases.

you seem to think all progamming applications are database driven. This is a capital NO

It is pure[b] hard core [/b]algorithm design.

C++ has the best and fastest inbuilt Mathematical and Statistical functions

What you do in Monte Carlo has a lot to do with breaking down a very large dataset into smaller chunks which can then be computed in a Grid or in Parallel and then merged back together. This is a very computationaly intensive work.

and who told you the language will do much here than the processor will?
you seem not to understand this computer world clearly, your language may be able to save you millisecond when compared to other languages, although it may mount up though.
assuming you are using a 4GHZ dual core computer, a task that will take 1minute,
on a single core computer with 1GHZ, same task may take 30 minutes, thats the kind of  difference we are talking about processor wise.


if you have ventured into the digital animation world, then you will know that industry has loads to offer in terms "heavy" computation needs
rendering out models require calculating x and y coordinates of the model, point by point  and correctly converting them to images.

that is similar to what you get when moving around work areas of tools like maya and 3ds max, cos the computer needs to calculate what you should see, relative to the actual underlying vector
all these are intensive calculations

now, let me ask you a question, when you say 2*2 in your programming language, you must be thinking your language does the actual work abi?
i laugh in binary, 
your language is nothing but what it's called, "LANGUAGE",  for communicating with the computer, the only thing the computer understands is 0 and 1, which is refered to as binary, last time i checked, C++ isn't binary.

C++ has the best and fastest inbuilt Mathematical and Statistical functions

i laugh in binary the second time.


let me add more rantings:
the key to your car isn't your car, same way your remote control isnt your tv, they are tools that you can use to communicate with the actual car
or TV
comparing 2 remote controls has little base, rather, you should compare the two TV's performances
maybe comparing a core from intel, to an Athlon from AMD

webdezzi:

and who told you the language will do much here than the processor will?
you seem not to understand this computer world clearly, your language may be able to save you millisecond when compared to other languages, although it may mount up though.
assuming you are using a 4GHZ dual core computer, a task that will take 1minute,
on a single core computer with 1GHZ, same task may take 30 minutes, thats the kind of  difference we are talking about processor wise.

In some enviroments the difference between making $1 million profit and losing $1 million is in milli sec or secs if you do not react fast enough to market opportunities

webdezzi:

now, let me ask you a question, when you say 2*2 in your programming language, you must be thinking your language does the actual work abi?
i laugh in binary, 
your language is nothing but what it's called, "LANGUAGE",  for communicating with the computer, the only thing the computer understands is 0 and 1, which is refered to as binary, last time i checked, C++ isn't binary.

i laugh in binary the second time.

let me add more rantings:
the key to your car isn't your car, same way your remote control isnt your tv, they are tools that you can use to communicate with the actual car
or TV
comparing 2 remote controls has little base, rather, you should compare the two TV's performances
maybe comparing a core from intel, to an Athlon from AMD

webdezzi:

if you have ventured into the digital animation world, then you will know that industry has loads to offer in terms "heavy" computation needs
rendering out models require calculating x and y coordinates of the model, point by point  and correctly converting them to images.

Dude you are not making any sense here. I have demonstrated to you what "heavy work" is and why PHP is irrelevant in these areas.

I was expecting you to come out with a counter argument justifying why it can be possible and probably cite scenerios it has been used but you keep talking about something else.

Just to add. Nobody does binary level programming except harware programmers.

These days computationaly intensive systems are getting distributed either in Parallel or to a Grid

I can see that you do not understand these concepts .

webdezzi:

@Afam you need to know that there are heavy works that are very very heavy

@kobo, there is nothing like heavy work, na keyboard we go use solve am

programming is not rocket science only that very part you refuse to learn.
-Oluwaseun

I didn't even see this your earlier post.

You are obviously terribly ignorant to think that there is no "heavy work" I hope you have learnt something from my post.

If you want additional pointers as to what "heavy work " is don't be afraid to ask

Also next time don't go about exhibiting your ignorance in a public forum

webdezzi:


and who told you the language will do much here than the processor will?
you seem not to understand this computer world clearly, your language may be able to save you millisecond when compared to other languages, although it may mount up though.
assuming you are using a 4GHZ dual core computer, a task that will take 1minute,
on a single core computer with 1GHZ, same task may take 30 minutes, thats the kind of  difference we are talking about processor wise.

No, @Webdezzi, that is not how it works. Throwing hardware (more processors and more ram) is not the best approach to dealing with the sort of problems you describe above.  What we are talking of here are ways of obtaining maximal efficiency, even on single processor machines.
It is possible to get the same program that runs for 30 minutes on a single processor machine to run for 4 minutes on the same machine by applying models that help do this. Php is limited in that area, but languages like Java, .NET languages, C++, Ruby and Python(the last two do not have concurrency built in but that can be implemented using such languges as STAGE), already have tested and proven models that deal with concurrency, distribution and parallelism.

webdezzi:

if you have ventured into the digital animation world, then you will know that industry has loads to offer in terms "heavy" computation needs
rendering out models require calculating x and y coordinates of the model, point by point  and correctly converting them to images.
that is similar to what you get when moving around work areas of tools like maya and 3ds max, cos the computer needs to calculate what you should see, relative to the actual underlying vector
all these are intensive calculations

And what do you think those in digital animation do? Throw more hardware at their application when they discover the process time is slower than they want?

webdezzi:

now, let me ask you a question, when you say 2*2 in your programming language, you must be thinking your language does the actual work abi?
i laugh in binary, 
your language is nothing but what it's called, "LANGUAGE",  for communicating with the computer, the only thing the computer understands is 0 and 1, which is refered to as binary, last time i checked, C++ isn't binary.
i laugh in binary the second time.

Language is simply a way of communicating with the machine itself. Yes, it is all translated to machine language for the machine to interpret it all. That does not mean that all communication from all languages end up communicating the exact same message to the machine. 

webdezzi:

let me add more rantings:
the key to your car isn't your car, same way your remote control isnt your tv, they are tools that you can use to communicate with the actual car
or TV
comparing 2 remote controls has little base, rather, you should compare the two TV's performances
maybe comparing a core from intel, to an Athlon from AMD

You can compare the machine code delivered from compiling two different languages,right?

@webdezzi

Here's a simple enough practical chore to get you to understand the importance of milliseconds.
Run a video app (entirly with PHP, no C++, C, C#, Java etc). The video dimensions must be at least 600px x 450px.
[list]
[li]Grab every frame as a bitmap (or whatever format suits you)[/li]
[li]colour any pixel red, if it has a brightness above a given threshold[/li]
[li]Save the image of every frame as a jpeg[/li]
[/list]

You should be able to get this up and running in no time. On an old 2.81GHz, 1Gb RAM box; C# will do it comfortably in less than 15 milliseconds, PHP will take at least 1000 milliseconds (maybe, even as much as 5000), whereas, a video frame takes just 30 milliseconds .

If you are doubtful, I can give you the C# code to convert to PHP right here. Then, you will tell me how PHP did and stop arguing