I’ve been using PHP for quite awhile too (2001), but not day in, day out in awhile. Right now I’m working at a company willing to teach me Java (Grails/SpringMVC based project) & I’ve got a decent grasp of it.

Point is, the PHP Cert exam isn’t really going to help me at the moment, but I hope it will in the future. You’ve given me a lot to think about!

Thanks

I understand that Facebook is written in PHP, then compiled to C, and finally compiled to a binary. It was originally written and run in PHP, but it didn’t scale well enough by itself.

I’m still not sure if I’m going to take the Zend’s PHP5 Certification Exam. The job market in my neck of the woods is really competitive, so I’d love to have that on my resume. On the other hand, It’s just not clear how much it would improve my programming ability by becoming an expert in the strange quirks and gotcha’s of PHP (or any other language for that matter) when I have such easy access to quality documentation for those quirks.

I think my Java paragraph was more of a rant because I’ve been programming in it for so long. The big advantage to a scripting language is being able to write applications quickly. A lot of people talk about how Java is more scalable, but think about web applications and think about where your greatest bottleneck is. What are your applications always having to wait on? They wait on the database. I listened to a presentation by a YouTube engineer who talked about their reasoning for using Python. They realized their biggest bottleneck was waiting on the database and they’d rather have a language they could develop in very rapidly to deal with constant growth.

That being said, Java web applications can bet written to cache database results in memory and some application containers can distribute this cache across a cluster (although IBM WebSphere’s DynaCache is horrible). But even in that respect, many scripting languages can access tools like memcache. Some good examples of highly scalable applications built on scripting language frameworks include Facebook (PHP) and YouTube (Python at one time, although currently it’s unclear what they use). Twitter was once entirely written in Rails, however now only their web front-end is in Rails with the message system written in Scala (a functional language that runs on a Java Virtual Machine).

With Java, you’re talking about more initial setup for your web application environment. It also takes time to deploy changes, where as in a scripting language it can be instantaneous depending on your setup. In either case, you want to use some type of model/view/controller (MVC) framework (Struts, JSF, Cake, Rails, or a custom one) rather than dealing with just JSP/PHP files.

And in both instances, scaling for massive growth isn’t instantaneous. It takes planning, good system administrators and engineers to scale up any type of web application. You can also write horrible code in any language or framework.

With all things being equal, I’d rather work on web applications in a scripting language. But just always keep in mind, there are always trade-offs in how you chose to implement something.

Back to the PHP certification question, I’d say it’s worth it to have on your resume. Just don’t expect to be able to study for it using the Zend training materials. If you find a better and more accurate third party study guide, let me know.

Also, what makes you say that “scripting languages like PHP, Python and Ruby are vastly superior in web development to Java?” I’m learning Java now and was wondering if I should pursue it further as a Web Developer.