-----Original Message----- From: Charles, Joshua Micah (UMKC-Student)

... It's been my experience that php doesn't scale up to larger projects very well when compared to .Net/C#. It quickly becomes an organizational nightmare. With C# and .NET(which includes mono), it is very easy to compartmentalize your code any number of ways. For example, put you entire data access layer in one assembly( shared library), you business objects into another, security and permissions in another, etc. etc. You can use a different namespace for each one to make your code more readable. And namespaces can be shared across assemblies.

Well it is really up to the developer to compartmentalize the code. That is what we get paid the big bucks for. As far as scaling, take a look at squirrelmail and phpgedview. Both of these PHP apps are quite professional and phpGedView is considered the best genealogy web viewing app on the "market". They are around 8 and 4 MB of code respectively and are quite well compartmentalized if you ask me. I have done some tweaking to the code on phpGedView on my site, and have not had any problem understanding the organization of the developer. In fact the hardest programs I have ever had to debug and understand were those that were "compartmentalized" by a program for the developer rather than by the developer. So, I consider a language that predefines where to compartmentalize things to be a downside. To each their own though.

I'm not saying that PHP is a magic bullet. I just like things that I can display on my browser at home and in the office and not have strange things happen. Something I notice happens quite frequently with .Net.

JMHO, Brian