What are you working on?

[Scott]

PHP or Java? what do you prefer? I find they are the two languages that seem to have the developers who oppose each other the most but secretly envy features of each other.

PHP went down the whole JAVA style software framework design that doesn't really sit well with how Apache is already mapped onto the directories and .htaccess with URL rewrite is clunky as hell (don't get me started on templating). Java pretty much tried to emulate PHP's inline coding style with JML only much worse in syntax but better in execution because you can define your own tags which php doesn't do well.

I liked both for different reasons. PHP I found insanely powerful and much more of an engine than Java. Java I only really used to try and avoid HTML as much as I could. I didn't use Java for anything other than visuals and formulae.

Simple things like coding a header for an HTML based webpage, then calling it via PHP at server side just made my brain smile. It's the simple things I guess. I dare say the same thing could be accomplished using Java, I just used the forum logic (PHPBB) to figure out how it all worked and went from there. Databases and server access was all fairly straight forward for me so it was the obvious choice.

I don't know the nuts and bolts of any particular language, I just have an ability to figure things out to get them doing what I want.

Security was my first HUGE issue. PHP is an absolute minefield for scripting. I really struggled to keep up with cleansing inputs.

All good fun though