Introduction
Without dispute, “enterprise” is a much-disputed term in the software
market. Many companies label their software as an enterprise application
due to marketing reasons in the hope to grab a piece of the cake. PHP
companies are not free from entering the “enterprise barkers”,
especially now that PHP 5 is out[1] – mostly because it offers
better objectoriented and XML programming features compared to PHP4. But
does that qualify to meet the demands of the enterprise market? The past
years have seen a convergence in the enterprise application sector,
favouring a component-based and multi-tier application architecture.
Hence, the question is also whether such architecture can be built for
mission-critical projects with available PHP software. The evolution of
enterprise software development has mainly been driven by the Java 2
Enterprise Edition (J2EE)[2]. Today, J2EE could be named the de facto
industry standard for the development of distributed multi-tier
architecture applications. It is backed up by industry leaders like Sun,
Oracle, BEA, and IBM. This article will compare PHP’s software stack
with what’s available in (and for) J2EE, to overcome the typical
Java versus PHP discussions that usually focus on language features, but
do not take into account the overall picture. Basically, this article
assembles a PHP5EnterpriseEdition(PHP5EE).
In a Nutshell
This discussion of J2EE and a comparable PHP software stack called
PHP5EE provides useful information for:
* Project managers and developers as guidelines for decision making
in the pre-implementation phase of an enterprise Web project, who are
looking for an over-view of available software alternatives in the Java
and PHP world
* Developers who want to make their PHP application more standardized
or generic in the way that J2EE is
* Developers who want to integrate elements of J2EE to be used by
their PHP application or vice versa
What is “Enterprise”?
The enterprise software domain is an endless field of exploration and
evaluation, a moving and complex target. To approach this topic, I will
first formulate a broad working definition of the term “enterprise”:
An application can be regarded as enterprise software if it is useful
for large enterprises in that it solves a set of problems which are
particularly relevant to such organizations. As we can tell from this
definition, both business and technical factors account for the success
of an enterprise application; hence they will be addressed in the
following sections. You should bear in mind that J2EE or PHP5EE are
software development frameworks, tools, or execution platforms; rather
then ready-made applications. Due to this fact, there are basically
three actors involved: (1) enterprise customers in need of a certain
application, (2) companies who develop those applications based on an
enterprise architecture and respective libraries, (3) vendors of
software development kits (SDK) for the enterprise market, like Sun
Microsystems.
Business Factors
Some of the main business factors for customers and suppliers of
enterprise applications as well as frameworks are:
* The general economic situation influences the financial resources
available for decision-makers.
* Time-to-market can be significantly reduced for application
developers if they can rely on third-party libraries and do not have to
reinvent the wheel. This factor is also important for suppliers of SDKs
to stay ahead of alternative frameworks.
* Especially when seen from the perspective of application
developers, it is highly important that the used framework is a
dynamicallydevelopedproduct to stay competitive in the market.
* Most enterprises have to deal with legacy systems that form a
heterogeneous set of software installations and want them to be
integrated as good as possible.
* Concerning a heterogeneous environment, cross-platform portability
might well be a crucial factor, although not for those enterprises that
stick to one platform due to strategic decisions.
* For those companies who offer basic software infrastructure like
libraries, frameworks, and tools, the in-markettrackrecord can decide
upon the success of their products, because the more market experience,
the higher the credibility and anticipated reliability of the software.
* It needs a pool of skilled programmers who can deal with a certain
enterprise product to ensure the quality and sustainability of the
product and related services.
Of course, there are many more factors, but for now we shall concentrate
on how the mentioned factors apply to the J2EE versus PHP5EE discussion.
The following evaluation is meant to draw the general picture; I will
elaborate on each point from the technical perspective later.
General Economic Situation
In an economic downturn, as it has been experienced after the Internet
hype, costs need to be reduced. Some argue that this favours Open Source
solutions over proprietary software. Whether this is true or not, it
does not really play a role for our comparison of J2EE and PHP5EE,
because both architectures can be implemented with Open Source software.
Given that J2EE is supported by Sun and other industry leaders, more
money and work time is devoted to the further development of J2EE
compared to the PHP Web development market.
Time-To-Market
Due to this fact, the proposed PHP5EE has, generally speaking, a slower
time-to-market then J2EE – at least if compared on a similar
technical level of code quality. Of course, both frameworks have their
strengths and weaknesses if we speak of time-to-market. One could claim
that it took PHP four years to go from pseudo object orientation in PHP
4 to a more mature model in PHP 5. On the other side, PHP was already
there before JavaServer Pages (JSP)[4] came to life, which allows
program snippets to be conveniently embedded into HTML. To be more
precise, we should take a closer look at how J2EE is developed compared
to the proposed PHP5EE. J2EE is an effort mostly directed by Sun,
channelled by a standardization procedure called the
JavaCommunityProcess[3]. Despite its name, the specifications are not
defined by a community of Open Source programmers, rather by a board of
companies. This is very contrary to how the PHP engine and parts of the
PHP5EE are specified, because this is very much an Open Source effort.
Thus, no concerted development plan exists for the PHP5EE, which makes
it hard to predict how dynamically the software stack in total is
developed and maintained. Of course, once a J2EE developer makes use of
Open Source products like JBoss, Struts, Turbine, and Cocoon, she faces
the same dilemma.
Legacy Systems
As far as the integration with legacy systems and cross-platform
portability is concerned, it is hard to say whether J2EE or PHP5EE is
better equipped to do the job, they are rather the same. It is certainly
a myth that Open Source products are, in general, better in dealing with
heterogeneous environments just because everyone can contribute an
extension. The more important point is how long a product has been in
use in the enterprise market, since decision makers assume that the
answer to this question is directly correlated to the problem solving
power of the product. This assumption must be modified if there exists a
single-vendor monopoly, then, the software will likely be less adaptive
to specific customer needs. This is not the problem with PHP5EE because
its development model is that of a reactive Open Source community.
Though the development process of J2EE is different, it seems to be open
enough for proprietary and open source projects[5] to ensure diversity
and adaptiveness.
In-Market Track Record
The big players in the J2EE market certainly have a long in-market track
record, which is not the case for most companies that do PHP application
programming, leaving aside that none of them can be called a big
company. This disadvantage is lessened by the fact that the PHP5EE is
based on Open Source software – some of its parts are developed by
several coders from different small to medium size companies to
eventually create high quality software. Although the in-market track
record seems to be less important on the product-side when using Open
Source software, it nevertheless plays a role on the service-side of the
enterprise software business.
Skilled Programmers
Currently, it is hard to find skilled PHP developers[6]. One reason
might be that since PHP is easy to learn, many think they are good
programmers after some months of PHP, thus making it difficult for
companies to separate the wheat from the chaff. Another valid point
might be that there are simply more well-paid Java jobs out there?
Furthermore, J2EE is an established concept in the enterprise market and
a good bet for aspiring programmers to get a job after having uplearned
the framework. On the contrary, many PHP frameworks exist and
slowlyconverge only because of PEAR[7]. Evaluating and learning about
the various PHP frameworks still takes a lot of time and leaves
programmers with a vague job perspective.
Technical Factors
Next, we take a look at the technical factors that define an enterprise
framework. Some of them are directly correlated to the earlier-
mentioned factor and others that have not been mentioned here. (The
“others” could as well be discussed as business factors since many
technological concepts, say, `interoperability’, have been
identified as key selling points in the enterprise market.) For now, we
concentrate on the technology:
* Fast prototyping and development is a technical factor that plays
together with the time-to-market business factor. Enterprise frameworks
are supposed to help developers concentrate on the business logic of the
application and to ship with libraries that implement often needed
solutions.
* Enterprise platforms should be based on a modern
programmingparadigm, which of today is object oriented programming
(OOP).
* An enterprise application should have the ability to support
increasing numbers of users. In other words, it should be scalable.
* The performance of an enterprise solution effectively describes how
fast the program can be executed.
* Enterprise applications should provide highavailability, which is
achieved by a redundant cluster of machines to service requests.
* What has been discussed above concerning legacy systems translates
to two technical factors that enable communication with other software
systems – interoperabilityandextensibility.
* Maintainability describes how easily an application can be
analyzed, modified, updated, or deployed after (or even before) it has
reached production status.
Again, there are surely more technical factors that could be added. For
now, let’s take a closer look at how these points relate to the J2EE
versus PHP5EE comparison.
Fast Development
PHP as a programming language, combined with its wide range of available
extensions, offers indisputably quick and easy Web development
capabilities. However, this does not automatically qualify it as the
better choice for enterprise development, when compared to J2EE, as far
as fast development is concerned. Due to the level of complexity that
enterprise applications need to handle, they are intrinsically complex
software. It is a feeble argument that PHP application development is
simpler because it adheres to the Unix-way of “keep it simple, stupi”.
Sure, single parts of an enterprise application should always be as
intuitively comprehensible as possible, but the whole system will,
inevitably, be complex because of the many dependencies between the
parts and several different technological concepts that co-exist in such
an application. PHP5EE can definitely serve as a better platform for
fast prototyping, but once it comes to the point where the production
system has to be implemented, J2EE is not necessarily slower in terms of
development speed.
Modern Programming Paradigm
Concerning OOP, PHP has made a big step forward[8] with the latest major
release. PHP 5 allows programmers to define class methods and attributes
as private, public, protected(ppp), which is important for a clean
separation of classes. The ppp-modifiers are a prerequisite for more
orthogonallydesigned applications that incorporate less coherent object
couplings, thus making them easier to modify. The PHP 5 engine further
supports this, since it ensures that classes defined as abstract or
interface need to be inherited or implemented, allowing for more
sophisticated (and actually verified) class roles. The Standard PHP
Library (SPL) “is a collection of interfaces and classes that are meant
to solve standard problems”[9]. Currently, it provides several iterator
interfaces; in the future, more design patterns will be added. Due to
several reasons[10], PHP 5 did not introduce Java-like namespaces or an
import()function that could have helped to avoid clashes between classes
or methods with the same name and additionally allow working with class
packages for easier application deployment. However, this functionality
can be partially mimicked with __autoload()[11]. Also new in PHP 5 are
exceptions[12] with a try/catch-flow; just like what Java offers.
Nevertheless, PHP 5 is still weaker in OOP compared to Java, but the
strength certainly is that programmers can also do procedural coding
with PHP 5 in cases where the OO-paradigm does not fit[13]. PHP 5 thus
gives project managers and implementers the possibility to assess the
trade-off between an inconsistent application of OOP mixed with
procedural code and an application that better adapts to its environment
with a variety of programming paradigms.
Scalability, Performance, Availability
I will not discuss the issues of scalability, performance, high
availability in extenso, since there are already some good
articles[14][15] available on the subject. When we talk about J2EE
application servers, I will refer back to these factors concerning the
`shared nothing cluster approach’ of PHP5EE.
Maintainability
The last point in the list of technical factors is maintainability.
Those aspects of maintainability that affect the deployment of
uplearned. Typically, they are implemented as Enterprise JavaBeans
(EJB)[25] or a Servlet[26].
* Components are executed in their own runtime environment, also
called a container, that can handle specific routines associated with
the respective component type.
* J2EE is designed to allow for multi-tier applications that separate
display, logic, and storage, and adhere to the Model-View-Controller
(MVC)[27] pattern. JavaServer Pages (JSP)[28] is the predominant
technology to implement the display layer.
* Apache Struts[29] is a well-known Open Source implementation of the
MVC pattern in Java.
* Components like EJBs are executed in a multi-threaded environment.
* Additionally, components can be accessed in a distributed fashion,
for example via Web Services or Remote Method Invocation(RMI-IIOP)[30].
* Application servers provide a consistent runtime environment to
J2EE applications. JBoss[31] is a well-known Open Source application
server.
Figure1 summarizes the above; the diagram is taken from the J2EE
tutorial[32]. In the following section, I will present implementations
of some of the above J2EE elements in PHP that let you assemble a kind
of PHP 5 Enterprise Edition. Their limitations and missing pieces will
also be discussed. Although there are many Open Source PHP frameworks
available online, most of them adhere to a monolithic concept; they are
simply not tested or mature enough and eventually do not meet the
earlier-mentioned technical factors.
J2EE Architecture.
PHP5EE Libraries
J2EE comes with a multitude of libraries for various tasks, just like
the PHP community does – but are they qualitatively the same, do
they cover the same tasks? There are some libraries available for PHP
that provide solutions where no equivalent exists for Java, but I will
not concentrate on them here, because my focus is to ask for equivalents
from the J2EE perspective. The PEAR project is the most remarkable
attempt to create a consistent repository of OO PHP libraries.
Currently, it includes more then 260 packages. Since PHP 5, extensions
can as well have an OO-interface, they are part of the PHP Extension
Community Library (PECL)[33] as well as those that are procedural, or
both. PECL currently develops over 90 packages. Unfortunately, only
those extensions that are part of the PHP core are thread-safe; most of
the others are not. This is not the fault of PHP, since PHP itself is
thread-safe. The problem is that many extension developers did not
implement the proper functionality to ensure the extension runs in a
multi-threaded environment like Apache 2 Web server. Here, we shall
briefly go through the important J2EE libraries and see what can be done
in PHP:
* Databases : PHP has used relational databases since its early days.
Therefore, many solutions for database connectivity exist. A unified
approach like the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) package is provided
by the well-maintained PEAR::DB[34]. Its successor, called PEAR::MDB[35]
has a better and faster overall design, but not the same user base. Also
underway is a PHP extension available through PECL called PHP Data
Objects Interface (PDO)[36] – a very promising attempt to provide a
native abstract database interface which is not yet stable enough for
enterprise production.
* Authorization and Authentication : A J2EE server provides
mechanisms for user authorization and authentication. It knows several
authentication mechanisms and most of them can be done with
PEAR::Auth[37] for PHP5EE. For authorization tasks, J2EE servers ship
with a sophisticated model based on realms, users, groups, and roles
– something that PEAR::LiveUser[38] provides in a similar way. For
now we shall leave aside the issue of authentication and authorization
of components like EJBs and come back to them when we talk about
components in PHP
* XML :Interfaces for XML processing can be found in J2EE’s JAXP
API and covers SAX, DOM, and XSLT. The new PHP 5 XML extensions[39]
based on libxml and libxslt provide the same functionality. So PHP5EE is
well equipped in this field.
* Web Services :No matter, whether the Web Services hype of the past
years corresponds with the usefulness of this technology, it is still
regarded as a must-have enterprise feature. J2EE comes with the JAX-RPC
API that implements Web Service technologies like XML-RPC, SOAP, WSDL,
UDDI. For PHP5EE, basic and some sophisticated Web Services features
have been implemented in PEAR::SOAP[40] and PEAR::UDDI[41]. Since PHP5,
a SOAP extension[42] has been built into the PHP core, however, it lacks
features and has not been widely used. Java’s Web Service interfaces
have the clear advantage in that they are more advanced and tested.
* Transactions :A transaction library takes care that data integrity
is ensured in operations within multiple (distributed) programs. With
transaction control, components can roll back an operation and revert to
the previous state in case the operation fails. The Java Transaction API
(JTA) helps developers to manage and coordinate transactions across
heterogeneous Enterprise Information Systems (EIS). In J2EE lingua, EIS
describes all systems that contain data that needs to be accessed by
J2EE like RDBMS, LDAP, or any third-party application or legacy system.
JTA can, for example, span transaction-safe updates to multiple
databases from different vendors. I have not heard of anything similar
available for PHP up to now.
* Message services :The Java Message Service (JMS) API enables
communication between J2EE components and applications, and forms the
basis for a Message Oriented Middleware (MOM). JMS is a key feature of
J2EE concerning the management of distributed business logic, since
components can be loosely coupled via an asynchronous messaging
architecture. Recently, PHPMQ[43] has been released to serve the same
purpose. It is based on the MantaRay messaging bus[44] and the Java
extension for PHP[45] that lets PHP call the Message-
ProviderConnectorJava class, which acts as a wrapper around the
java.rmi.Namingclass with the help of a PHP class named messaging. As
the latest release, version 0.2.2, of PHPMQ suggests, the current code
is a working and promising proof of concept but not meant to be used in
a production scenario.
* Connectors :The Java Connector Architecture (JCA) is an abstraction
layer to allow a unified and transparent access to legacy systems aka
EIS. So-called Resource Adapters that link into JCA are available for
J2EE from SAP and Siebel for example. I have found nothing that could
leverage this functionality to the PHP5EE.
This overview shows that it is currently an impossible undertaking to
assemble a PHP5EE equivalent to J2EE. In some fields, PHP5EE libraries
are on a par with those in J2EE concerning production use; in others,
they cover the basic functionality or are not yet production ready;
there are also fields where simply no equivalent PHP implementation
exists. It must be noted that interfaces of PHP libraries are, almost
always, very different to similar Java packages, which cannot be a
criteria per se when talking about the quality of the APIs. Instead, an
important factor is that the presented PHP packages are more or less
inconsistent. Many PEAR packages are still implemented in PHP 4 OO, they
do not make use of exceptions, nor of abstract, interface, private,
public, protected. Most of the Open Source PHP code available is
currently in
the phase of transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5. Furthermore, most of the
PHP5EE libraries are implemented in PHP (PEAR packages), while others
are PHP extensions written in C (PECL packages). Although a PHP5EE
developer does not necessarily have to know C to make use of extensions,
the faster execution time of extensions makes one wish that all PHP5EE
libraries would be implemented as PECL packages. This circumstance
indicates that highly skilled PHP5EE programmers should know C –
something that is not the case for J2EE developers, because they can
stick to the Java language.
PHP5EE Components
Speaking of components, one could argue that the PHP engine itself is to
PHP5EE what the JSP/Servlet container is to J2EE. With numerous template
systems available for PHP, the multi-tier separation of display and
business logic can be achieved in a similar quality with both platforms.
The situation is very different when it comes to multi-threaded and
distributed business components like EJBs. This technology can be
mimicked on a low level with either a non-blocking stream[46] that calls
another PHP script; or on *nix only with the Process Control Functions
(PCNTL)[47] used by PEAR::PHP_Fork[48] that resembles the
java.lang.Threadclass interface. A far better solution is offered by the
Site Resource Manager (SRM)[49] that, ironically, calls its EJBs
“bananas” instead of “beans”. This project was started a few
years ago and the main developer (Derick Rethans) has recently resumed
development after some months of pause. Many bugs have been fixed in the
current CVS version. So SRM now performs quite stable.
SRM allows a PHP script to call remote classes aka SRM Bananas, to
define application level variables, and more. A SRM client is
implemented with the SRM extension that hooks into PHP just like any
other extension. Listing1exemplifies a call to an SRM banana, which
consists of instantiating the SRM constructor with the connection
parameters for the SRM daemon on the remote host. Then an SRM
Application (aka SRM Banana) is created with the connection object and
the name of the class that is called. Finally, a method of the remote
object is invoked.
The SRM daemon manages the classes that can be called from SRM clients.
The daemon utilizes the PHP SAPI to interface with PHP and execute a
remotely called SRM Banana locally that is then passed to the SRM
client. All SRM Banana files follow a naming convention and reside in a
directory that has been defined as the include path for the daemon in
its srm.iniconfiguration file. Figure 2 visualizes the complete SRM
architecture and Listing 2 shows how an SRM Banana is implemented –
they are created by extending the Bananaclass and defining the methods.
To actually make the class an SRM Banana, it needs to be instantiated
and the Banana::run(0 method executed – only then can the SRM daemon
properly pass the object to the remote SRM client. Derick’s work on
SRM is part of his employment at eZ System, an Open Source PHP CMS
company. This shows that there actually exists growing corporate
interest in having a technology of distributed business logic components
for PHP. Unfortunately, SRM development focuses on PHP 4 and there are
no definite plans to port it to PHP 5 as yet.
PHP5EE Application Servers
What keeps all J2EE elements together is the application server with the
proper runtime environment and various tools included. There are no
out-of-the-box Open Source solutions available for PHP5EE, similar to
JBoss for Open Source J2EE. Not only do PHP5EE developers have to make
up the framework on their own with several third-party products like
PEAR classes, but they also have to compose a PHP5EE application server
on their own. This means, there is no integrated solution for the
deployment, execution, maintenance, clustering, load balancing, and so
on of a PHP5EE product, as yet. They need to combine several proprietary
and Open Source software like Cisco’s Local Director, Linux Vertial
Servers, and Squid for load-balancing; SiteScope for performance
monitoring; rsync, scp, and sftp for deployment, and so on. Although,
this does not sound like a consistent runtime environment, note that the
Open Source tools mentioned here are common knowledge in the PHP
community. Looking at it from that perspective, there actually exists a
relatively consistent PHP5EE application server based on best practices
– it is just not available as one single product.
Of course, the PHP5EE application server cannot compete with the variety
of high-end application servers available for J2EE. For example, PHP
favours a shared nothing cluster approach due to its Apache-centric
design of forked processes, which allows “infinite horizontal
scalability in the language itself” as Rasmus Lerdorf put it in his
article ” Do you PHP?”. Shared nothing means that every server
has its own filesystems with its own copy of applications running in the
cluster. This system becomes problematic when the application needs to
be updated often. There are many J2EE application servers that follow
either the shared nothing or shared disk approach. A shared disk cluster
obtains the applications running in the cluster from one single storage
device. Thus, such a device becomes a single point of failure and a
single logical device interface interacts with redundant storage media
(SAN).
PHP5EE with J2EE
To overcome the deficits of a PHP5EE, Zend and Sun have partnered in
defining and implementing a standard for PHP to interact with Java –
the JSR 223[50] specification. It aims at positioning PHP for front-end
applications that interact with business logic done with J2EE. A
reference implementation can be found behind the Download pagelink of
the specification’s homepage. The JSR 223 also specifies how PHP can
be called from within Java, and Zend also offers a PHP Enabler for Sun
Java System Web Server[51], but I won’t go into details on that. The
realization and usage of JSR 223 is quite similar to the afore-mentioned
Java extension, which has been in the `experimental’ stage for a
long time. PHP is integrated in the Java Servlet environment with a Java
wrapper around the PHP engine (which is why a Tomcat server needs to be
set up if you want to use JSR 223 for the Web), which makes it quite
simple to call Java classes from inside of a PHP script as Listing 3
demonstrates. It remains to be seen when JSR 223 is ready for production
environments and how reliable it will be.
Summary
It is obvious from this comparison that PHP5EE cannot keep up with J2EE.
So, whenever PHP 5 is claimed to be ready for the enterprise, it must be
doubted as far as large and complex projects are concerned. That said,
however, the earlier statement must be refined because it is not really
clear how to define a piece of software as a large and complex
enterprise application. The most adequate interpretation of the
comparison is that PHP5EE best serves the needs of small- to medium-size
enterprises (SME), because they often do not need high-level frameworks
and application servers as offered by the J2EE
market. Furthermore, PHP5EE is strong in solving Web-related tasks that
don’t heavily depend on distributed and multithreaded business
components like EJBs. If they do so, the JSR 223 is a promising sign
that PHP can expand to this niche of the enterprise market. By some
means or the other, the objective of this article was to play the
devil’s advocate and compare the Open Source PHP software stack with
what is available with J2EE. Some might argue that this was an unfair
comparison, but I would counter that only by comparing with the best
products in the market, the deficits of PHP become clear and can be
addressed properly. In no way should this article be a dispraise of all
the good volunteer work that happens in the PHP community, but it
definitely needs more successful companies in the PHP market who
continuously climb up the ladder and extend the PHP software stack. The
most important task for the community as well as the companies seems to
be to actually create a kind of PHP5EE that constitutes a consistent and
qualitatively managed framework for enterprise Web development with PHP.
By Sandro Zic
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