9iAS vs PHP

Hi,

My company have recently (before I joined) decided to drop 9iAS in favour of using PHP (still using Oracle as the database). This was due to them having their fingers burned on previous projects, where 9iAS was used poorly, with huge amounts of complicated, hard-to-maintain embedded JavaScript within the PL/SQL. That's what comes of using contractors!

There were 8 main points of criticism, several of which were based on misconceptions arrived at through looking at the existing 9iAS applications, which I won't go into here.

I had plenty to say on all the criticisms(!), but I would be interested on your views on the following points:

1. Oracle Application Server is expensive with no apparent advantages for us.
   -- Now I pointed out that we obviously already have 9iAS. Is there
   any limit to the number of DADs that can be configured on a server? Also, is it recommended to have development and test systems on seperate Application Servers?
   -- As for advantages, I mentioned Portal (use of single-sign-on
   especially)
2. PL/SQL was not designed for web development
   -- So what, I said, it can still do the job. PHP was not designed for
   talking to Oracle either!
3. PL/SQL requires recompilation, even for trivial changes
   -- Ha ha!
   
4. No separation of business logic and presentation
   -- I pointed them towards HTT in the Portal Development Kit.
   
5. Each web request requires a call to the Oracle RDBMS
   -- So what!
   

I also pointed out that using PHP means that you are splitting the logic / code between end (Oracle) and middle (PHP) tiers. This obviously can increase the complexity of any web application, and the boundary of what logic should be handled by Oracle and what by PHP may be hard to define.

I would be grateful if anyone out there could think if there are any other benefits I've missed. To be fair, I'd be interested in any disadvantages in 9iAS too (apart from cost).

Regards,

Charlie Received on Tue May 14 2002 - 10:26:25 CEST