Welcoming a new author
I'd like to welcome my friend Sandeep as a new author on this blog. In the meantime, I'll be taking a temporary leave of absence, and entrust this blog to him, whom I trust to make better use of this space. You can find him at twitter as @sandyssn and email him at sandeep [AT] iambot [DOT] net
See you when I see you.
India and cheap IT
As an Indian, I don't consider IT to be a savior of the country. Just don't. Sure it THE fastest growing sector, and booming along with mobile and internet penetration in the country, but its known as a place for cheap labor, and not otherwise. India probably needed such a boom for its economic revival, but at what cost? The companies hire in thousands, dumping the freshers right out of college in one of their many development sheds, where they code as zombies all day, day after day. And the sad part is, they don't mind it!
PHP bashing has to end!
Of late, I've been noticing a lot of PHP bashing around the web. Most of it is related to one major issue: Security. Granted, PHP's security implementation isn't the best out there, and it is a widely discussed topic. But more often than not, the security loopholes are due to bad/inconsistent programming principles, rather than a core PHP issue.
Also, PHP's lack of support for threaded programming is another major let down. While this is a genuine issue, rewriting the entire PHP core and the parser to support threads is not worth the effort. But I genuinely haven't felt the need for multi-threading in PHP till date. While threading is a must for system programming, the need for it in a web environment is not entirely clear. Also, the major strength of PHP - its simplicity will be compromised if threading is to be introduced.
Another genuine concern is the confusion caused by settings such as "register_globals" , "magic_quotes", "safe_mode" . These three variables have had a major impact on the deployment of PHP scripts. Web hosts allow ways to tweak these settings, but for the layman who just wants to get a blog up and running, its a bit of a hassle. Also its an issue that needs to be addressed by web developers who want maximum compatibility for their applications. The next major release PHP 6.0 aims to completely do away with this settings for good, and that will indeed clear up a lot of mess.
Most of these issues boil down to one thing - the lack of a an official formal specification. Although the PHP Group oversees the continued development, it is still a community effort, and as such requires stringent software engineering and management. Since the original PHP parser was completely rewritten for version 3 and above, there have only been attempts to patch up vulnerabilities, and add new features like Object Oriented Programming, namespace support among others. PHP 6 is touted to be THE release, which will address most of the major concerns.
For all its shortcomings, its still THE easiest server side scripting language to work with. The C/C++ syntax, seamless integration with MYSQL, support by almost all web hosting providers still make it THE web language IMHO. The LAMP stack is undoubtedly the king of the web, and will continue to be so, owing to the simplicity and widespread community support offered by all its components. And not to forget, its completely free.
Hello bizzhost
Yup, I managed to upgrade my blog without any accidents, unlike the last time I moved from Habari. I'm now hosted on bizzhost on their tiny plan which costs me Rs 350 a year (yea, damn cheap!) The plan does have its limitations, but I'll do just fine. Not only is it faster, its also offers pretty comprehensive options panel, and again its cheap.
So cheers to the move, and I'll fix the remaining weak spots in the next couple of hours.
Moving to a new host
So I got myself a cheap hosting account (Rs. 350 for a year) and it seems pretty good. Hopefully it will be activated today, and this blog will move there. Weird thing is, the reason I wanted to move was because my current host was acting up, and was getting unusable due to very slow MySql server. But now, things are looking good, and is actually pretty fast too! Anyway, let see how the move goes.