My opinions on this edition of the No Fluff Just Stuff Java Symposium are about what they were at the last one I attended. Alot if interest in AJAX and alot of interest in Ruby On Rails. Completely lacking from this was mention of PHP. As a matter of fact, the only mention of PHP that I heard was a half-compliment, but mostly bash comment from one of the speakers. While I make know claims to be an expert or to know even a fraction of what this speaker said, I fear that he was severly mis-informed. His quote was along the lines of:

PHP is low-level, very productive, but lacks concern separation.

I see where he could make this mistake, but he completely missed the boat. Escpecially when considering the PHP 5 world. I can see his point if he is referring to PHP scripts, but in Object Oriented PHP, this is not an issue, or if it is, I haven\'t come across it yet.

Not only that, but with templating engines such as Smarty, its every bit as MVC as any Java application can be. On top of that, he obviously hasn\'t researched any of the available PHP frameworks. (CakePHP comes to mind immediately since this was a Ruby on Rails talk).

I get the feeling that PHP doesn\'t get any respect amongst the \"real-programmers\" of the world and that the academic programmer see PHP as a hack language. I\'m not sure why nobody here at this symposium is willing to take a look at it and god-forbid, present on it. It reminds me of the way people used to treat linux. \"Ah linux is just for hacks and hobbyists\" etc. But just look where linux has gone as of late. Sure it doesn\'t own the world, and probably never will, but it has certainly gone from being an OS of hobbyists to being a viable server OS, and though many would argue...even a desktop OS. (Don\'t even get me started down that road).

Perhaps someone should step up and begin presenting PHP here at this thing...hmmmm Andy comes to mind. Hell Andy, I\'ll even help ya present it. It needs to represented here, and in my mind, deserves the respect that is due.

In closing, you need to use something before you can bash it...I don\'t get the feeling that anyone here has really used it...lately.