PHP or JSP (J2EE actually) ?

Which is better, JSP or PHP? that's a religious question, depends on whether you believe in god or not? but who is god anyway?

The question itself isn't a very good one. It should be which is
better J2EE or PHP because it's not really possible to look at JSP in
isolation. There is no doubt that PHP is the better language for
building web apps. PHP is the shortest path between the problem and the
solution. J2EE will take you through a more scenic path. It might
possibly be argued that the road built with J2EE technology will be
more durable and can carry vehicles with bigger loads, but that is
another religious question.

If you are a java programmer you will say PHP code looks really
messy when you embed it into HTML and PHP programmers will come back
and say JSP looks a lot worse, which is true. The retort generally
given is that you can make use of various tag libs such as struts or
jstl to make the code neater. Some people will also make vague
references to the MVC pattern.

If these advocates of tag libraries look at the servlet source code
generated from their JSP they will surely bring up their dinner. Hand
coded JSP when made into a servlet might make you lose your appetite
but your dinner will hopefully stay in.

Not so with PHP, once you have written a few hundred thousand lines
of code with PHP you can make scripts that look distinctly sexy.

Now, JBoss actually got me to rant about this debate. There are thousands of commercial sites running on PHP.Services such as Amazon, Yahoo, Google, and Slashdot have known about
scripting languages for years and used them effectively in production.
Yahoo even adopted PHP as its language of choice for development. Don't
believe the hype in the white papers that says that PHP isn't for real
applications or doesn't scale.

But wait, Google runs on Python? Yep, Google uses Python. Maybe because they implement semantics in their engine and Python is the choice language in NLP.

So why JSP ? Why JBoss ? Scalability ? Neater code ? Capability to handle bigger loads?

Well, again, this is a religious question.

It is a matter of belief.

Indy Is Back !

I watched awestruck as Indy swung high above the snakes in the dark chamber while trying to get the Ark Of The Covenant in Raiders. I was only 9 then. Some of you were not even born yet (kind of old, aren't I?). There were no state of the CGI, just fake shrunken mummies and live snakes from Industrial Light And Magic, but that didn't stop me (I didn't even know what was CGI then) from going ga-ga.

Indy was one of my favorite heroes, right after I saw him running for his life from a huge rolling boulder. I always wanted a fedora (hmmm ... maybe that explains my obsession with Linux ....) and a whip.

Well, maybe I can relive those memories again this Saturday. Yes, I am watching the midnight screening of Kingdom of The Crystal Skull.

Maybe Indy's a bit old, but he still wears his fedora and carries a whip.

Now, let me see if I still have my fake whip.....