the Forty-Second Parallel

I've come to a new realization of late as to why I really still use PHP as much as I do - it's so darn easy to install. Sure it's an ugly little language that has warts and inconsistencies and all those things that people a whole lot smarter than me like to complain about. But, if you just want to do simplest thing possible, it's hard to beat (darn it).

No endless hoops of painstakingly tedious configuration to step through on the server side. Drop the module in the right place, add a handful of basic lines to the Apache config file and you're off. Sure, you can make it more complex if you compile it yourself - but, if you're gonna do that you probably know what you're getting into. On my OS X workstation, for example, it was just a matter of downloading and running the installer from Entropy and I was in business. Need a quick form processing script? No problem. Want to rotate some images on a page? Have at it.

Even Ruby on Rails, which I love and prides itself on dispensing with all of that yucky configuration stuff, is a bear to get running behind Apache. You've got to mess with aliases or virtual hosts, setup FastCGI (technically not necessary, but realistically it is), then poke around at other files (.htaccess and dispatch.fcgi) to get things just right. Not that any of this is entirely the fault of Rails. This stuff is complicated and it takes a lot of work. But, sometimes you just need the simplest thing possible to work, which is where PHP shines.

And, granted, Rails (insert favorite framework here) wasn't written for the simple things. It's a framework - it's meant to hold lots of pieces of a site together. You don't use frameworks to rotate pictures of your dog on your homepage. But, here's the kicker - once you've used a good Python (CherryPy) or Ruby (Rails) web framework and fall in love with their elegance, it hurts to go back to using something like PHP. Even for the little things. Things like mod_ruby and mod_python are supposed to make it easier to do that. But, in my experience, they're a pain in the butt to get up and running.

So, I'm stuck using PHP for the little things. Unfortunately, half my life is made up of the little things :-(