The “no structure” critisms of PHP

Ive been recently reading a book on the limitations of Java and to my suprise the author has been using PHP along with Ruby to show how Java development bogs down the development process. What I dont agree with is how he author attacks PHP, primarily the example on how PHP does not have a basic structure and it is because of this that PHP has not been widely accepted as a enterprise challenger.

“Quick compromise frameworks trade conventional wisdom and siound design for implementation sped. PHP and Visual Basic, for example, compromise by trading desgin wisdom for development speed” — author

I completely disgree with this statement. I believe a language must not be tied down to one particular framework or architect design, MVC for example. The language should allow the developer to build a framework around the language much like what PHP does now. If a developer wants to build an application based off of MVC then PHP allows them to do it. If the developer wants to build an application with out structure, PHP is there to do it aswell.

PHP works great with the MVC framework and now has Symfony and the Zend Framework to work with. Also by using Smarty and PHP, PHP can become structured not by internal design, which the author suggest should be a prerequisite but by the external developers of the application.

The PHP community should educate PHP developers to code MVC, Template Patterns, Front Controllers etc etc into their applications. This will allow all nay sayrs to use another excuse as to why PHP faulters, or compromises this quality for another fault.

Blame the PHP developer not the php language for building non structured applications.

Armando Padilla