It is dismaying to me that there is no PHP app server software to compete with the Java app server market.

I like PHP. Java is not sliced liver but it is a lot more complicated generally to achieve the same results with Java than PHP. Servlets were nice and straightforward, but it's gone downhill since then.

Part of Java's success IMNSHO is that it is fat - there is a class for everything and anything and the IT managers must send their Java programmers to expensive courses to learn how to not raise exceptions.

This is the same marketing model as Microsoft uses with it's dev languages/systems: sell it to the management, produce millions of lines of documentation, sponsor hundreds of paper copy titles, make it not taste completely like shy*e to the programmers, and then charge a lot of money for the support.

Real programmers can code up most of the crap Java offers as builtins in C, C++, PHP, PERL, etc, in fairly short order: shorter order than decoding a typical standard Java object's class hierarchy takes.

All the above is true whether on uses vi, emacs or slickedit.

Let's see, neither of them are exactly going to break any speed records, especially not the ones set by the languages whence they were extra-maritally spawned; and both are often used for creating insecure, buggy applications which unfairly cast aspersions on the reputation of the language.

PHP and Java ought to get on like a house on fire! That or *set* the house on fire .....

"Real programmers can code up most of the crap Java offers as builtins in C, C++, PHP, PERL, etc, in fairly short order"

The maintainers of thousands of apps that implement their own half-baked, incorrect implementations of distributed two-phase transaction commit would probably disagree with you.