'big text pump' would be a great way to summarize how languages like Perl and, to a lesser extent, PHP started. this was really enlightening to me to think of web services in this way. after all, even with all the DOM vs. SAX and in-memory vs. file-parsing, etc....XML is text. and when you're talking about advanced Web Services...it's a LOT of text. so being able to handle text files easily and efficiently is a huge advantage of PHP over heavier app platforms like J2EE and .NET even. in theory, a stripped-down lamp5 box will blow away a J2EE app server on text handling, ie. Web Services. the ease of using the text is evident by the simplicity of the extensions that handle XML.
in addition to the cool angle on PHP vs. J2EE, I was made aware of ActiveGrid, which I'm not yet sure whether to view them as a partner or a competitor of lamp5. I think ActiveGrid's purpose is to be able to create application servers that scale over a large number of small machines, as opposed to a small number of heavy machines. so I can see a partnership where ActiveGrid helps in developing lamp5 architecture such that it is suitable to spread over large numbers of small machines.
I'm going to be frequenting both of those blogs, so future postings of mine may come from links to theirs.
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