ASP-Style Programming in PHP?
An old buddy of mine wants to start using PHP, but the problem is that he's been working with Microsoft technologies for so long, he doesn't get "the PHP way". His background, for many years, has been with ASP.NET, COM, and those sorts of things.
As it turns out, there's a PHP framework out there that maps well to "the ASP.NET way": Prado.
They're at a 3.0 release as of a week ago, and won the Zend PHP5 competition last year, so that should speak to the quality of the software. From the page about PRADO we can see they base their concepts on a component model, so it's very like Apache Tapestry, Borland Delphi, and (for the guy who asked me originally) Microsoft ASP:
Most PHP frameworks are trying to establish a loose standard of organizing PHP programming, most preferably the MVC (model-view-controller) model. It is difficult to compare PRADO with these frameworks because they have different focuses. What we can say is, PRADO is more like a high-level language built upon PHP while those MVC frameworks stand for the best programming practices. Both aim to help developers to rapidly complete Web application development. The advantage of PRADO is its rich set of prebuilt powerful components and extreme reusability of the PRADO code, while the advantage of the MVC frameworks is the complete separation of model, view and controller, which greatly facilitates team integration.
I can see that PRADO is very much *not* my style; I don't know a lot of open-source scripter types (Perl/PHP/Python/Ruby) who would really go for this, as it seems over-architected to me. This is not meant as a critical point against PRADO, because it obviously fills the needs for those who like that style of programming. Personally, I don't really want another language on top of PHP (this relates back to why I started Savant; i.e., as a response to Smarty). But if you're used to Microsoft or Java, I can see how this would be an easy way to get on board in the open-source world and start using PHP with your previous non-PHP habits.
Which brings me to a philosophical point: is there a better phrase than "the PHP way" to describe the way we expect PHP apps to be built, or some sort of metaphor that encapsulates the concepts related to "the PHP way"? Not just MVC, because PRADO appears to do that, but some other way of describing succinctly how a PHP app "ought" to be. Maybe there isn't one single description.
Having said that, I think these template notes from the WACT project might be useful hints; see also here. My bet is that the greater majority of PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby programmers are "imperative" guys than "declarative" guys, and maybe that plays into what a proper metaphor might be. Prado/ASP.NET are clearly more declarative, and Savant/Solar/etc are clearly more imperative. Perhaps Less Code is related to the metaphor we want.
I'd be interested to hear comments and feedback, if for no other reason than to compare and contrast the different approaches.
UPDATE (2006-05-04): Interesting analysis from here; note that it is originally from Dec 2005.