I really dig PHP. I code it in nearly every single day and I have found it to be extremely satisfactory in developing web apps. It’s far from perfect and it’s use is always contextual but it does a good, sound job consistently.
That’s why I’m a fan, and that’s why my ears are perked about Facebook’s HipHop PHP and I’m going to be following closely it’s development.
For the vast majority of you this is probably quite boring and uninteresting but for those interested you know this could be a game-changer. Here are some reasons why I think we should pay attention:
From the blog directly:
With HipHop we’ve been able to reduce the CPU usage on our web servers on average by about fifty percent depending on the page.
Less CPU means fewer servers.
This project is incredible, has had a tremendous impact on Facebook and we are releasing it as open source in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling large complex websites with PHP.
The net result? Cost savings. Significant cost savings. And we all can benefit from that.
This is just one of the many things that’s planned for HipHop and I think the Church should take note. Our desire has always been to do things with excellence with high impact while being fiscally responsible. A tall order, I know, but choosing the right technology can make this an easier to achieve.
If you’re interested in reading more Om Malik has a great post here that’s a good summary and read.
Tom says
Alright, so my initial reaction to this was this is kinda cool. I mean, no matter how you spin it, compiled code is always gonna run faster than interpreted code.
Additionally, taking an open-source, free platform and then providing a way to compile it is huge in terms of cost. It can be ridiculously expensive for a small business or non-profit to afford Microsoft’s stack. Even the BizSpark stuff is kinda pricey, in my opinion.
But I’ll be honest – I’m not running to go mess around with this yet. Granted, I’ve never seen Facebook’s codebase, but I’ve used their product enough to know that there are some serious issues with their product.
From a purely business standpoint, they’ve faced backlashed with the Live Feed/News Feed when they first introduced it, and then flubbed the privacy controls with the first launch and the second launch. Even Zuckerberg got burned by it.
Their Ajax functionality only seems to work a fraction of the time (I get the modal dialog for unable to process request more than ever now), and paging through albums doesn’t always load image thumbnails nor does it always even advance to the next page. These appear to either be problems with their asynchronous requests either on the client-side, queuing them up on the backend, caching, and/or all of the above. Generally speaking, it looks like a scale issue. These problems aren’t new and there are solutions – lots of sites have dealt with them yet they are persisting here.
These aren’t meant to be gripes about the application as a whole, but they demonstrate my point: if the functionality of their base product is weak and littered with obvious bugs, why would I have any reason to believe their compiler be any different?
Okay, off the soapbox.
John Saddington says
thank goodness we have you. because i was taking a look deeper yesterday and saw a lot that i didn”t like. dang son.
Scott Magdalein says
Yeow! Anytime a company as big as Facebook releases their secrets for scaling their flagship app it’s big news. This qualifies.
John Saddington says
seriously. let’s see where it goes.