Kind of hard to concentrate on all these important projects I’m working on right now during the holidays (and my birthday too 
), but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.
What projects am I talking about?
- a web shop for movies (Java Server Faces, Ajax4JSF, Hibernate and some other libraries)
- Gamers Initiative, a community site for game developers and gamers (Ruby On Rails)
- an advertisement site, let users create advertisements and submit them to magazines and/or newspapers . (ASP.NET, C#)
- creating a little experiment (some kind of poll) for the thesis my girlfriend is writing. I’ve been experimenting with some PHP frameworks, but haven’t decided which one I’ll use. So far Symphony (MVC-framework) and Prado (framework similar to ASP.NET) are fun and fast to use, though they both are very different.
I also tried Zend Framework and CodeIgniter, but they got me less excited. I don’t like the way database abstraction is done in Zend, and CodeIgniter is too limited in several ways.
A bit late for Christmas, but I’d like to say: a merry Christmas and a happy new year. I wish you all a good health, lots of love, a good web year and everything else you might need.
Posted in
MCT,
Personal at December 26th, 2007.
No Comments.
Yesterday, I heard from 2 teachers they wanted to remove PHP from the MCT curriculum. So now, the new academic year has started en it seems that PHP is reduced to a total of 3 lessons (during 2MCT)…
Also, when you do a specialization in web technology during the final year, you don’t have a PHP course anymore since it’s been replaced by Ruby On Rails.
Why? This is what they had to say:
Big company’s and corporations told us they had no need for PHP. It’s too simple, dirty and too hard to maintain for their needs.
Are these companies underestimating the future of PHP or not?
I think there are several reasons to continue teaching PHP in MCT, and several not to.
Pros:
- PHP is all over the place. Most of the websites you come across on the web are written in PHP. And it will stay that way, for many years to come.
- Hosting PHP on a Linux server is cheap and easy. It’s affordable even for small busnisses.
- The amount of PHP-frameworks using the MVC-principals is growing fast, and they are getting better and bigger. They make PHP-websites a lot faster to create, a lot easier to maintain and easier to expand on.
- Not all MCT-students will end up in a big company. (right?)
Cons:
- Once you have a decent knowledge of several languages/frameworks (like J2EE, ASP.NET and RoR), it’s pretty easy to learn PHP yourself.
- There’s not “that” much you can learn about PHP in school. Most of it will come through experience. J2EE, .NET and RoR on the other hand are much more complex, capacious and broad. So they are a lot harder to learn by yourself.
- Testing.
- Reusing business logic code from company programs in your website, without rewriting it in another language.
So I’m not really against their decision about PHP in MCT, but I do think PHP has a bright future (even for bigger business applications).
Posted in
MCT,
PHP at September 27th, 2007.
13 Comments.
I wrote my previous post in English, because I thought it would be useful for a lot of people. And from now on, I’ll write all my posts in English.
It’s not my native language, so there’ll probably be some mistakes. Feel free to correct me in the comments or send me a mail.
The next couple of months I’m going to blog about school, and as this is my last year in “Multimedia and communication technology” and my specialisation is “Web Technology” that’ll be the main topic ( not the only topic ). I’ll be posting additions to the lessons, discussing some interesting topics and things I come across on the web.
What to expect:
- J2EE
- ASP.net
- Ruby on Rails
- and also xHTML, CSS, PHP…
Posted in
MCT at September 22nd, 2007.
1 Comment.
