Java EE Vs. PHP
Enterprise systems and applications differ from consumer products in that they are designed to be used by many individuals, such as company employees, with a high degree of integration between components. These systems need to be reliable and make their users more productive. While developers can use PHP or Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) to produce enterprise products, Java EE has a number of advantages over PHP with respect to enterprise systems.
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Java EE Platforms
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The Java programming language can produce executables to run on computers that run any operating system for which Oracle produces a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) -- including Windows and Mac OS -- as well as on HTML Web pages as applets. This allows Java programs to act as both servers and clients. In programming terms, server programs accept data from and distribute data to client programs. The platforms for which Oracle produces JVMs means that developers can use the Java language to program server and client components that will run on physical servers, desktop computers, laptops, and mobile devices.
PHP Platform
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PHP is exclusively a server-side scripting language. This means that the source code for PHP has to be stored on a server and can execute only through an HTML proxy when a user accesses the PHP file through a Web browser. While this, combined with PHP's interfaces for interacting with a variety of databases, makes it a useful language for creating database-centric website content management systems, it limits PHP's functionality in creating enterprise systems.
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Enterprise Features
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Java EE provides a number of tools that allow for different Java components to interact with one another across an integrated enterprise system, scale with usage traffic, and have cloud computing capabilities. These include the Java Message service and frameworks for developing Java Servers. However, PHP scripts do not have the same robustness in terms of the tools for communicating with other PHP components and do not directly handle traffic scaling. This is handled by the HTML proxies that run the PHP scripts.
Threading
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A major advantage of Java EE over PHP in developing enterprise systems is its ability to simultaneously execute multiple threads. This means that a Java component of an enterprise system can run multiple processing tasks simultaneously, while a PHP component can execute only a single task at any given time. This allows for the creation of server programs that can handle multiple incoming and outgoing connections at once, as well as client programs that can do more than a page programmed with a PHP script.
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References
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