NYCPHP Meetup

[Phil Duffy]

I am sorry if this question appears to be off-topic, but perhaps someone can
refer me to the correct forum.  I had programmed in approximately a dozen
languages previously before dabbling in PHP a couple years ago.  Now that
PHP 5 is truly object-oriented, I find it to be the most powerful of the
languages with which I am familiar.  As remarkable as the Web is, I am
coming to the conclusion that it has some severe limitations for the kinds
of complex applications that were the standard in the client/server days.  I
know that going back to client/server is not the answer and suspect that
somewhere someone is working on an Internet-based system that could
ultimately replace the page-oriented Web.  Can anybody point me in that
direction?

My primary concern with the Web is that it seems to be a force-fit of
page-orientation and statelessness to structured programming/object
orientation, which I find to be inherently task-oriented.  Applications that
depend heavily upon related records require that users perform all kinds of
browses.  Under those circumstances, managing communication among objects
becomes a nightmare because it requires the application programmer to
predict communication paths to objects and manually handle session variables
that are not task-scoped (they are by definition, session-scoped).  It
appears to me that there is a role for session variables, but it is not the
task.

The force-fit described above is particularly apparent when programming in
an MVC and validate/process/display workflow environment.  While many
programmers have reservations about the need for these disciplines, it has
been my experience that they become increasingly important as the size and
complexity of an application system increases.

Any thoughts will be appreciated.

Phil Duffy
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.nyphp.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20061018/037dd045/attachment.html>