Sunday, March 22, 2009

Is PHP a Good Choice?

I have participated in several Java projects in which the business logic was in RPG programs executed as stored procedures from the Java webapp's persistence layer. Upon subsequent reflection, a three tier Java webapp seems to be too heavyweight a solution when the business logic is in the RPG. After all, the purpose of a three layer architecture is to provide for a separate business logic layer within the Java app. If an organization chooses to not implement business logic in the Java, why then use Hibernate, Spring, Struts, etc, etc, etc?

I plan to play around with PHP in order to gauge the costs and benefits it offers as a front-end to legacy environments.

The best instructions for enabling PHP on the Mac are here.

Note: The /private/etc/my.cnf file contains the critical mysql.sock information.
Note: /Library/WebServer/Documents is the Mac's default location for PHP files.