Comments on: When WCM isn’t enough

By: Chris Graham

Chris Graham — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:05:05 +0000

I hate PHP a bit too, it has plenty of flaws. But where it really matters, it wins – there is far more software written in it, anyone can pick it up, you don’t need to compile anything, you don’t need to try and fathom how an application server works, it runs on virtually any server (pre-installed on hosting), there are far more programmers for it than anything else, it’s very easy to learn, you can write quick and dirty things or very sophisticated things. Nothing more modern can beat it simply because it is now the de-facto standard across the web, and I don’t think anyone can argue against that. And this is what matters when it comes to integration, what’s stable, what’s compatible, what’s easy, and what there are affordable programmers for. My point really is that I get annoyed when I see enterprisey people complain about all kinds of things that only exist because of the over-analysed and expensive environments they’ve chosen to work in.
But yes PHP sucks. It is an ugly sloppy language compared to some other options. But at the same time, that’s kind of irrelevant – a skilled programmer will work around PHP’s flaws with far greater efficiency than trying to get something written in Java.

By: Michael Kowalski

Michael Kowalski — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:17:23 +0000

We all hate Java, sure. But a lot of us hate PHP too; maybe hate it even more. There are more modern options, you know! Not that I want to get into another stupid language flame war

As to Phillipe’s point: I’m inclined to think it’s better to use something that was actually designed to be a web framework über alles for delivery, and decouple the management stuff into a separate app. But yes, getting the integration points right can be tricky.

By: Chris Graham

Chris Graham — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:02:28 +0000

Our approach as a vendor has always been to not distinguish strongly between content management, and web application framework. CMS features are just one example of how the framework is used to provide some default features, but there are many others, like forums, or chat rooms. And other applications can be coded in seamlessly. It’s pretty much the same as a portal framework (in fact, it’s in our product name), but there are critical differences — most of these portal frameworks tend to be done in Java, by programmers who don’t understand the web well, and require complex and expensive hosting environments, hence the high integration cost, un-friendly URLs, and poor compatibility with other things (especially when it’s closed source). We (and others- we’re not unique) base everything on PHP which makes things a whole lot easier to integrate (I reckon anyone who has tried both PHP and Java coding will realise how much easier it is to work with PHP on a casual basis), and it’s the language of the web so it doesn’t require top-salary Java programmers to work with it.

I probably annoyed some people with this comment, and I know I over-generalised, but I think it still makes some important points. There’s nothing inherently wrong with portals, it’s how they are implemented. In fact, doing it without a portal is probably never going to work well, because you need the portal-like structure to encode the consistency of the system – otherwise you get a mess, or the inter-communication language is as complex and assuming than just coding as a “portlet” (or whatever you call it – we use the term “module”). Sometimes closed enterprise-thinking leads to enterprise-costs when you can do just the same thing cheaper and better by looking at PHP.

I know it sounds like it, but I don’t hate Java. It just I think is usually the wrong tool for building CMS.