One of php's main advantages is the availability of many options. You have the option to do web apps in plain php. You have the option to do web apps in many mature frameworks.

Languages like ruby and python lack this. Can you do a website in plain ruby as easily? How many mature ruby web frameworks are there in ruby? There are many in php. Zend Framework, Agavi, Kohana, CodeIgniter, Prado, Yii, Symfony and many others.

Of course some stuff in php suck hard. I would personally love an string-object to replace all the stupid str_*() functions, but php is in the right direction of adding features. (My last issues are fixed by 5.3's late static bindings)

And im surprised how php community quickly adopts changes. PHP 5.3 breaks compatibility but i see more people using it everyday.

I think despite all the negativity, PHP is going to stay for long-term.

> Can you do a website in plain ruby as easily?

Don't know about Ruby, but as for Python - yes, you can. There is Python Server Pages in mod_python, which are similiar to mod_php.

However, mod_python is ugly (in a same way mod_php is), so it's generally frowned upon and considered to be Bad Thing.

It's not just ugly, it's unmaintained.

There's always mod_wsgi and writing a raw wsgi app- which honestly, isn't particularly hard or bad.

I believe, this is a consequence of being ugly.

"Can you do a website in plain ruby as easily?"

I've written websites in plain Ruby, as CGI scripts running on Apache. I actually find this easier that PHP, as Ruby doesn't have nearly as many weird inconsistencies. I think I'm pretty unusual in being one of the few Ruby programmers who didn't immediately begin with learning Rails.

Ruby with Passenger can be used for a simple website. Throw in Sinatra with Datamapper or ActiveRecord and you've got a lightweight setup - with better options for string manipulation than PHP :)

"The number of times I got bitten in the ass or just wasted time trying to figure out how the "magic" in Zend worked was infuriating."

This is true for all frameworks in all languages. Instead of doing the Unix thing and providing well-behaved libraries that do one thing well, people build a pile of opinionated spaghetti. To quote HN user mahmud:

"snippet -> program -> application -> library [STOP HERE]-> framework [GO BACK]->platform [GO FUCK YOURSELF]"

That's a great quote. Is there a link for it?

Exactly all of that!

Everytime I tried to use any of these PHP frameworks, I got frustated because they demand you to be stucked inside the "convention over configuration" and you can't do anything more complicated into your code without having to read a lot of docs about how to make something outside the "normal code". You always have to inherit you controller from something else.

This is why I built a framework fomr the ground ( http://github.com/rabc/Simple-Framework ). Just because I wanted to craft my own code.

In my opinion, I found a framework(or so called un-framework) that gets ORM just right in PHP: http://flourishlib.com/

I too ended up using Smarty and doing the rest myself, but I feel that this particular framework has gone in the right direction.

The best thing about Flourish is that it doesn't pretend to be Java, it acknowledges PHP.

Bottom line: it made my code smaller and a lot readable. I highly recommend checking it out.

While I agree about the Zend framework, Symphony and others trying too hard to be full of features, frameworks like Code igniter are really light. Sure for some very very basic projects it might still be too much, but for an actuel interactive websites chances are higher of it missing features than having too many ...

Can you give an exemple of something it does by default that is "pointless crap" ?

Pointless crap is subjective. Zend_SOAP, I imagine, would for many be considered "pointless crap", but having it available means I don't have to go looking for a SOAP library when I need it to interface with a gateway.

People always confuse features with bloat. Disk space is cheap, and these frameworks aren't hurting things by having additional features.

Now, complexity I can get behind, but stop relating complexity to weight or bloat. CI is less complex than ZF because it does substantially less. It requires developers to do more to accomplish the same tasks ZF developers can do a lot faster. However, it takes a lot more work to get to that point.

Personally, I'm glad we have these choices. We can choose the right tool for the job. =)

Really about Zend? We use Zend Framework extensively and find that while we can roll our own (and I certainly have), it is a well-documented MVC framework that provides a decent foundation for our applications. Zend probably only solves 10% of our issues - the remaining 90% are very application-specific logic.

As for the edit/compile/deploy/run cycle in Java web app development, the Play Framework pretty much reduces that to just edit/refresh. It's really amazing.

I've done two projects with Play and both development cycles are extremely fast.