Yahoo adopts PHP script

The PHP scripting language has received a strong endorsement from Yahoo, following news that the Internet portal giant is to begin using PHP as its standard server-side scripting language.

Yahoo software engineer Michael Radwin told delegates at PHP-Con in the US that the company would not replace existing software en masse, most of which was written using C, C++ and Yahoo's proprietary scripting languages. But new projects would be developed using PHP.

Radwin said the move re-affirmed the company's commitment to open-source technologies, and its motivation was that it needed a more scalable system that offered better support for rapid development and deployment.

Performance was also a key issue for Yahoo, as it is the world's biggest Web site and handles 1.5 billion page views per day, Radwin said. PHP performed almost as well as Yahoo's proprietary YSP scripting system in Yahoo's benchmark tests.

Open source

The current system includes 8.1 million lines of C/C++ code and three million lines of Perl, maintained by 612 software developers. Open-source technologies currently used by Yahoo include the Apache Web server, Free BSD Unix operating system and Perl scripting language.

Radwin indicated that C and C++ were problematic because they require relatively long development cycles that include edit, compile and debug phases. He argued that such an approach is not conducive to rapid application prototyping, and that it is too easy to make mistakes with memory. This opens the door to buffer overflow attacks by hackers.

Radwin said he had rejected Apache's alternative to PHP, called mod_include, because it lacked looping and subroutine functions, and provided lower levels of performance than PHP. Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technologies and Macromedia's ColdFusion were both rejected because of licensing costs. Perl was rejected because it could be complex to debug and was difficult to use in a secure manner.

Radwin suggested that Java technologies had much in their favour, but did not work well on FreeBSD owing to the operating system's poor support for threading.

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See also:

Apache builds more solid 2.0 Web server

The Apache Group is considering a 2.1 fork to allow innovative work on the Apache 2 Web server and to encourage uptake of the 2.0 version  19 Sep 2002

PHP scripting takes lead

The open-source PHP scripting language appears to be overtaking Microsoft's rival ASP technology in popularity  15 Sep 2002

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