When and why to use Quercus
I’ve been working on finishing up the Resin administration training course and one of the subjects is “When and why to use PHP on a Java server”. Of course, I’m referring to Quercus and as I wrote this section, I realized some things about the PHP and Java open source communities.
Java’s open source community is most well known for producing great libraries and frameworks, while PHP’s is most well known for producing great applications. In Java, it’s often assumed that you’re paying someone to produce the application while in PHP it’s often that you’re not paying anyone or you simply don’t have time to write a custom application. With these things in mind, Java and PHP really can be viewed as complementary technologies. So when would you use them together?
- When you need to get an application ready right away and there’s a popular PHP application available, but you’re a Java shop
- You want to unify existing but separate PHP and Java deployments into one
- Moving a PHP-only site to Resin for improved performance, reliability, and monitoring
- You need PHP for the frontend and and Java libraries on the backend and you want them to be able to talk to each other easily
These are just a few of the examples that I came up with, but I’m sure there are more. What has your experience been?