Posted by Jim at February 10th, 2004

Despite my better judgement, I kind of like PHP and Mysql for building small web applications. Not sure what I’ll think if I ever have to build a large one, but for small apps, it works pretty well.

I really don’t know PHP. At the moment, I’m relying on general knowlege of programming to get me through. Basically, if you know how to program in one language, you can program in almost anything due to the fact that certain things are pretty common (loops, recursion, data structures).

I’m currently working on a small database that supports a conference registration form for work.

With only a few hours effort (and little PHP experience), I’ve been able to set up a database for registration information and I’m fairly far into figuring out how to pass user information to Paypal so that someone doesn’t have to type their name and address twice.

I like the integration between PHP and Mysql that makes dumping sql into the midst of things fairly easy–not to mention handling sessions.

Anyway, I know there are problems with PHP, but they don’t show up in the small amount of work that I’ve done with it. That being said, I may be singing a different tune if I accidentally use register globals and broadcast everyone’s information to the world.