Posted by Dikkie Dik on 01/22/06 16:15

> Ok.. but let me ask you this.. What if you were building a real application,
> not a prototype. I'm talking about a real enterprise application. In that
> case you need to have unit tests and integration tests and you need to be
> able to change and adapt the application as it evolves..

That is exactly how I write my web applications. Both in PHP and Visual
Basic .NET. Being able to adapt an application is usually dependent on a
good design. You can make good and bad designs in all programming
languages. You can write unit tests in all programming languages. I
ported my own unit test framework to both VB .NET and PHP.

If you want or if you don't know better, it is perfectly possible to
write a relative small application in Ruby On Rails that is beyond
maintenance. Ruby On Rails facilitates good programming practice, but
you have to enforce it yourself.

> or perhaps this is
> a commercial web app that needs to be customised for different clients. I
> can't see how having all the code wrapped up in the pages makes any sense at
> all. It's scripting and to me scripting is akin to hacking..

Say what? That is how web pages are organized. You type a URL, and
there's a program that starts running. No difference between ASP, ASP
..NET or PHP here. If you mean you don't like you can mix HTML and PHP
code (like in ASP), there is nobody that will force you. In fact, most
PHP pages I have written have no HTML, but can generate it. It is also
perfectly normal to write included PHP code libraries, like the source
files in VB .NET. You can define more than one class in a file, but it
is up to you to use that or not.

Frankly, I don't know the difference between a programming language and
a script. I started my programming carreer as an AutoLisp programmer,
and AutoLisp was always called a programming language, even if it serves
just to "drive" autocad. And you can drive about anything from JavaScript.
Serious, BOTH scripts and programming languages have evolved. I have
written scripts to connect a text editor to a database or source code
control. Those scripts are large enough to use regular object oriented
programming. Scripting is not the same as hacking. You can hack in C,
just like you can program neatly in VBScript. And the other way around.

Best regards

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