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Adam Trachtenberg is the Director of the LinkedIn Developer Network, where he oversees developer relations and marketing for the LinkedIn Platform. Before LinkedIn, Adam worked at eBay in platform product management and marketing. Even earlier, he co-founded Student.Com and TVGrid.com. Adam is the author of PHP Cookbook and Upgrading to PHP 5. He lives in San Francisco.

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PHP vs Java (Take 43)

May 25th, 2005 • Related • Filed Under

In short: PHP programmers write apps; Java programmers write frameworks.

What would you rather do?

There Are 3 Responses So Far. »

  1. Comment by Ivo Jansch on 26 May 2005:

    Who says PHP programmers don’t write frameworks? (http://www.achievo.org/atk) ;-)

  2. Comment by Jeremy on 27 May 2005:

    The article would be a little more accurate if it started with “It seems like most of the small, public, written-by-one-guy, hosted on a shared ISP, cool end-user web applications are written in PHP.” instead of “It seems like most of the cool end-user web applications are written in PHP.”

    PHP is great, and so is Java, but saying that Java programmers just write frameworks is like saying that skyscraper building crews just build scaffolding.

  3. Comment by Adam Trachtenberg on 27 May 2005:

    Well, eBay is a cool application, and I think they use Java. :)

    But seriously, I think PHP has much more adoption in the open source developer community in terms of the applications that have been built and distributed — OSCommerce, WordPress, PHP-Nuke, etc.

    There are Java versions of these types of applications, but they’re more likely to be internal or commercial. And what the open source Java community has been building are frameworks instead of applications.