WEB APPLICATION

Benefits of Using PHP Language for the Web Application

Benefits of Using PHP Language for the Web Application

Introduction

The World Wide Web (WWW) first emerged a decade ago as a medium to render hypertext documents that were stored on the Internet, on a user's computer, using special software (the browser) and a new protocol (HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol) (Kaufman, 2011: 208-211). For the first few years, the WWW grew primarily as a new medium in which static content could be published, and information shared. The content was published in the form of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) files, which were served by Web servers, on requests from browsers (Gamma, 2009: 144-148). However, over the last few years the WWW has transformed itself from a static content-distribution medium to an interactive, dynamic medium. Content on the Web is now often personalized, and therefore dynamically generated.

Use of Web Applications Today

The Web is now widely used as the presentation layer for a host of on-line services such as e-mail, e-cards, e-calendar, and address books, shopping, banking, and stock trading (Beck, 2009: 144-148). As a consequence, the HTML files that are rendered by the client's browser are now typically generated dynamically after the Web server has processed the user's request (Beck, 2009: 56-61). This dynamic generation of HTML files has not happened without an associated performance cost. Just when Internet users were getting accustomed to 'click-and-wait' on dial-up lines due to graphics-rich Web sites, dynamically generated content started proliferating on the Web(Gamma, 2009: 105-107). Now users must wait not only for the network delay but also for the server side processing delay associated with serving a request dynamically. In many cases, this is turning out to be the largest component of the delay. From the Web-site providers' point of view, dynamic generation of HTML pages implies a lesser understanding of the real capacity of their Web servers. The vendor-provided 'hits-per-second' capacity of the Web server is no longer enough, as this only pertains to static HTML files (Kruchten, 2010: 133-137).

From the Web developers' point of view, dynamic Web content implies an additional technology decision: the Web programming technology to be employed in creating a Web-based service or product. This decision is based on several factors. Among the factors considered are ease of programming, richness of features, maintainability, reliability, and performance. Since the Web is inherently interactive, performance is a key requirement, and often demands careful analysis of the systems (Golding, 2008: 54-58). In this paper, we compare the performance of four Web programming technologies, namely Java Servlets, Java Server Pages, CGI/Cþþ and FastCGI/Cþþ. The study was motivated by a real need to make a technology choice for developing software that would support a Web-based service (Larman , 2009: 205-208). A study of existing literature showed varying conclusions about the performance superiority of one technology over the other. Proponents of the Java platform consistently claim superior performance of servlet technology mainly due to the elimination of the overhead of process ...