I am not real familiar with all of the aspects of PHP, although I have previously used it for creating small web applications.
It is very fast and effective for small database driven sites, but I dont find it to be a real solution for large scale applications.
The sites you listed dont appear to be as lightning fast as you say, with the exception of NASA which really uses very little PHP, it is mostly static HTML that is generated offline. And who has faster computers than NASA?
Have a look at delta.com, which passes everything through the JSP engine, even when it is unnecessary, yet seems to me to be faster than any of the sites you mentioned.
I dont see that PHP supports seperation of code from content as well as JSP does. As far as I remember, with PHP you have to have PHP code embedded in your HTML. That is not true seperation. JSP supports custom tags, which hide ALL java code from your web page designer. Web designers love their tags, but they are dangerous with code. Most of my JSPs have no actual Java code in them.
Then there is the issue of code reuse, third party Enterprise Java Beans, etc.
Then you have the J2EE standard itself. There is alot of value in a specification which defines in detail the proper way to creat 3-tier and n-tier applications that are scalable and easily modifiable.
I have not seen such a specification for PHP, nor have I seen n-tier systems developed with PHP, and find it hard to imagine designing one that uses PHP at its core.
All in all, PHP is a good scripting language for generating dynamic content for web pages, but not the best choice for enterprise applications.
But as Ive said, Im sure there are aspects of PHP that I dont know about. I had my brief foray into PHP, and moved on. I didnt learn everything about the language.
Perhaps you could enlighten me as to how you consider it to scale better than JSP?
Regards,
Gerald