Re: Perl and PHP

[TJPride]

Mixing the two is not probably something you should do. Yes, PHP is weak when it comes to manipulating nested data structures, however the difficulty and general messiness of adding Perl to your PHP makes that approach rather abortive. I'd personally either keep the two separate and use an AJAX (Javascript) pull from your Perl script to populate data on your PHP page, or do the page entirely in Perl. Or depending on your needs, you could substitute a properly-designed MySQL query for data manipulation in either language. What precisely are you trying to do?

I use both Perl and PHP for work, incidently - Perl for complicated data processing and PHP for more presentation-oriented sites. I try not to mix the two much in the same site, though.

[Anonymous Monk]

PHP's advantage is its disadvantage: it's a great big wad. Everybody's got the same wad. You can't add anything to it with modules; everything is compiled-in. But everyone's got the same wad ... oops! ... until a new PHP version comes along and changes the language. And heaven help you if you add a single unwanted space before or after the bracket tags. Bleah.

[tobyink]

Actually there's plenty of modules for PHP; many of them are distributed as part of the PHP core. For example, the cURL extension. Compile PHP with the --with-curl option and you get cURL; otherwise you don't.

The difference is that PHP extensions tend to vomit their entire API into the global namespace.

The embedded Perl interpreter for PHP I mentioned earlier is a compiled PHP extension module. It happens to be one that is not bundled with PHP itself, and also a rare example of an object-oriented one, which manages to avoid polluting the global namespace much.