Curia

I recently sat down to coffee with a new acquaintance of mine who spends much of his time implementing F/OSS projects at non-profit organizations, and who had just stepped into a lead web developer position using PHP. After sharing pleasantries we began trading stories and talking about each of our “tools of the trade.” When I mentioned that I used to do most of my web development in PHP, but have spent the past year or so trying to move as completely as possible to Python, his response was: “Huh, I have never really thought of Python as a PHP replacement.”

Now, this guy hasn’t exactly been living under a rock for the past 10 years—his resume was quite impressive and included projects in a number of different programming languages; But as you can imagine, I was rather surprised by his response, and it made me wonder: Has the Python community really been that bad at promoting the strengths of Python for web development? Or, does the nirvana experienced by switching from a language like PHP to Python just make us so at peace with the world that we forget the hordes of developers still stuck with C-style syntax? Either way, it got me thinking about a few of the reasons why I decided to switch from PHP to Python; and why I not only see Python as an excellent PHP replacement, but am surprised it is such a “best-kept secret” for web development.

There are already plenty of pages out there discussing Python vs. PHP as a language, so I probably won’t get too technical here. I also want to try avoid turning this into a “Python is better than PHP because…” rant (for more on that, please see the end of this post), so I will simply share with you a few of the main reasons why I decided to replace PHP with Python as my primary language for web development:

(continue reading…)

While writing scripts, I frequently run into the issue of needing to re-arrange sets of data into a more “process friendly” format. A common issue I encounter is needing to turn a list (array) into a dictionary (associative array) or vice versa. More often than not, I find myself needing to be able to access list elements by a key, but since they aren’t setup in a dictionary I have to pull out a looping technique to reorganize the data for this to be possible.

Take the following set of data for example:

[[1, 'John Smith', 'admin'],
 [2, 'Jane Doe', 'superuser'],
 [3, 'Sam Jones', 'user']]

What we have here is a few rows of user data. In this example, the data is in a Python list (which in PHP would be an array).

In PHP, this would look something like (using print_r):

Array (
    [0] => Array (
        [0] => 1
        [1] => John Smith
        [2] => admin
    )
    [1] => Array (
        [0] => 2
        [1] => Jane Doe
# (...etc...)

So, what if I found myself writing some code that needed to be able to access each record by its first value, which in this case would be the user_id? (continue reading…)

[Note: This post is the continuation of a series. Please read Round 1 first if you are just now joining us.]

In Round 1, PHP was looking like quite the tortoise of the group. However, if you’re familiar with some of the core differences between Python & PHP, you’ll know that Python has been “cheating” slightly.

Let me explain: By default, Python compiles each script into bytecode on its first execution, allowing this bottleneck to be skipped on subsequent runs. PHP, however does not perform this type of optimization by default (in the 5.x line at least), so the PHP interpreter must re-compile each file every time it is run. As you can imagine, this can give PHP (without an accelerator) a huge disadvantage when compared to languages such as Python.

With this in mind, I have decided to take Round 2 to focus solely PHP. This will hopefully provide a clear picture of the benefits of PHP bytecode caching (at least when it comes to page-views — the memory benefits are a whole other story), and give you an idea of PHP’s performance with the help of an accelerator.

There are many PHP accelerators available, but I have chosen APC for use here (mostly due to its inclusion in the upcoming PHP 6 core). (continue reading…)