To Java or PHP is the question

  • 18th May 2004
  • 3 min read

I have been a Java dude since its first version came in PC Quest‘s CD. PCQ didn’t even had a website then. I had to go on my bicycle to Sector 16 in Chandigarh to get that PCQ with a CD. I instantly fell in love watching those sorting applets showing the power of threads. Even in professional life I have used Java the most be it for making custom apps or apps based on SAP’s Solutions. Also my first blog was on JRoller.

But when it came to creating my own blog in my own domain. I settled first for MovableType and then moved on to WordPress. Both based on scripting languages. There were quite a few reasons that I chose to go this route. I will list few of them over here

  1. Economy The biggest one was as usual the money. It is cheaper to host a php/perl based solution which is based on how much resources an ISP has to put to support a solution. For scripting based apps the CPU usage is only momentary when the site is accessed (Do I hear people saying dude what about scalability) while for Java based first of all JVM is running all the time. Secondly you really want your own JVM. Last thing you want is someone else’s application has hung crashed the JVM and no one can access your site.

  2. Maintenance Again IMO there are more pieces in the Java side of the puzzle then are there on the scripting side. More the pieces more the complexity more single point of failures. For a single person hosting an app with few users it is too much to maintain 😉

All said and done I would say that if I had go for a blogging solution for one of our corporate clients I would be first one to jump on suggestiing Roller Weblogger or Pebble(though I don’t have personal experience with this). First Corporations won’t be as cheap as me so reason number one is blown secondly they have the neccessary resources to maintain these application. Moreover companies would already have people experienced with server side java app management.