AJAX Is Interesting, But The Basics Are Better
I had the good luck to share a cab back to the airport with Wez Furlong after php|works. Wez had presented a new talk about how to work with email properly (jokingly subtitled “Not PDO” by everyone there), and was curious to know how it was received. I replied that I liked it, but struggled for a moment on “why” … and then it hit me: the reason I liked it was that it was about a fundamental operation that still seems to trip developers up regularly.
Although I told Cal Evans when he interviewed me that the next technology I’m really interested in is AJAX (particularly its implementation in Protaculous), I’m not as excited by it as everyone else seems to be. I think it’s neat, but good grief, if wide swaths of developers can’t do input filtering properly, what good can adding AJAX do? Get the basics right first, then you can do progressive enhancement as you go.
September 19th, 2006 at 03:31
Note that the internetnews story is a rather vague summary of my actual talk. Taking very short soundbytes like it does can cause important context to be lost.
For example, it says:
“For the items that MySQL doesn’t handle as well as PostgreSQL, Lerdorf noted that some features can be emulated in PHP itself, and you still end up with a net performance boost.”
What I was talking about was actually emulating MySQL’s native prepared statement API because that API can’t make use of MySQL’s query cache. By emulating prepare/execute in PHP we can use the direct query API and thus hit the query cache in case that is something that would benefit your application. So it had nothing to do with PostgreSQL and as has been so widely reported, I didn’t suggest that people switch from PostgreSQL to MySQL by emulating PostgreSQL things in PHP.
September 19th, 2006 at 08:53
Yeah you gotta love journalism. Pretty soon there will be rumors about how you started PHP on drunken binge weekend with Paris Hilton.
September 19th, 2006 at 12:34
Of course, Paris Hilton would have been about 12 years old at the time….
September 19th, 2006 at 15:12
AJAX is more about making a better UI experience, not about forgetting the basics … so you’ll have always : AJAX = The Basics + fancy UI things …
January 4th, 2007 at 01:55
Cudos, PMJ, as I agree totally. I wrote an article for PHPBuilder years ago saying that very same thing with regards to SQL (ie. it’s based on relational algebra, etc.) and the people who start using GUI’s for SQL creation are at a disadvantage.