Linde002::PHP

So another session I visited yesterday was given by a hydrodynamical engineer (if I recall correctly) that used PHP to help him generate floodmodels. At first this didn’t sound like a task you would consider PHP to be good for but then he explained how he used it.

He has written a library that ‘glues’ all the seperate FORTRAN / C programs together using PHP so he can input raw data at the beginning and at the end it comes out the way he wants to without the need for him to input-output-input-outpunt-etc all the data into every seperate program. In between he uses MySQL and flat text files to save the intermediate data.

After all the processing is finished he then takes PHP with the GD extension and creates charts, animations and even small animated flooding movies from the data he has stored in the database.

The actual work, even though impressive, wasn’t that interesting to me, the interesting thing is that this engineer took PHP to do a job that it was good at, glueing components together. Utilising it strengths and acknowledging it’s weaknesses allowed the engineer to make his life easier. This should be a good lessen for all of you.

I attended a session on Dojo yesterday and I can’t say I’m impressed. The speaker was good and enthousiastic but it just felt like another general purpose ajax-enabled javascript framework. Especially the remarks that DOJO is inherently slow and includes 40 other .js files for one request if you include all the features were adding to my suspicion that I was right in never giving it a go.

The thing that really struck me though was that you can circumvent the 40+ include problem by, here it comes, recompiling dojo with a custom made built script that is read by java which will output a compressed dojo package that you can use.

IMHO, if you need a java packager for a javascript framework you might want to rethink your approach.