- the php developer's cookbook is good
- php is not bad but it's a giant pain in the ass. think: "oh yeah right,
php doesn't support multiple inheritance. what now..."
- php is a pain in the ass but it doesn't require launching a copy of the
perl interpreter everytime you want to do something.
- php doesn't have to launch the perl interpreter but then it also can't
do anything setuid (safe-mode might fix this but I don't think so; not
the way something like cgiwrap does anyway)
- php is not as powerful as mod_perl but, if we're being honest about
stuff here, isn't as flaky either.
- php doesn't have support for imagemagick
- php has this thing called the 'pear' which is supposed to be like the
cpan but isn't. additionally, the pear has to be installed with mod_php at
compile time; wtf knows.
- php does have a decent template system called 'Smarty'
- smarty, like all the other perl templating systems, has its own
'template' syntax which means if you want to use both you're limited to
doing variable substitutions.
- occassionally I've thought about rolling up my sleeves and teaching
'Smarty' to handle Template::Toolkit style syntax (TT knows how to DWIM
with HTML::Template templates) but quickly get discouraged by the volume
of other things I have to do.