[CLUE-Tech] Why PHP rules!

[Grant Johnson]

Well, I have been developing at work in ASP and at home in PHP generally 
PHP was the better of the 2, but it lacked one feature.  ASP had session 
variables.  Basically, a cookie, just good until the browser closed with an 
ID number was placed on the client, then a bunch of good info could be 
stored locally, and you could reference it, without ever needing to deal 
with the cookie, and never having to do the lookup yourself.  The newest 
version of PHP, 4, includes session variables.  I tried them out for the 
first time today.  Not only are they fully functional, the implementation 
is much better than ASP's.  You simply declare which variables are to be 
saved.  That is it, no trying to use associative arrays that work, but 
could return one of many results because they work on a search list that 
has other associative arrays in it, no recoding to use this, no need to 
specially set them, just tell it which ones to keep!

Now, there is one thing left, that MS has actually done well.  ODBC, 
although limited is a good idea.  Give one way to talk to databases that 
covers the basics, and write drivers to do this with any database.  There 
is a UNIX ODBC, but I have not seen much support for this.  PERL does this 
well, with DBI, but a general purpose one would be best.  Does anyone know 
of anything?   It would be nice to do development with one database, and 
then switch if needed.