E-Scribe : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. Started my career doing graphic design for newspapers and magazines in the '90s. Then wrote tech commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon, Chicago Tribune, and others you never heard of. Then I built operations software at a photography school. Then I helped big media serve 40 million pages a day. Then I worked on a translation services API doing millions of dollars of business. Now I'm building the core platform of a global startup accelerator. Feel free to email me.

Book

I co-wrote "Python Web Development with Django". It was the first book to cover the long-awaited Django 1.0. Published by Addison-Wesley and still in print!

Colophon

Built using Django, served with gunicorn and nginx. The database is SQLite. Hosted on a FreeBSD VPS at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet.

Pile o'Tags

ajax apple blogs browsers business design django ebay engineering fp fun google hardware haskell intellectual property interface iphone javascript linux media mercurial mobile open source os x oscon oscon2007 palm php programming python rails rants reading risks ruby site spam textmate the well tips tools ubuntu unix vcs web development web frameworks webservers wmassdevs writing

Stuff I Use

bitbucket, Django, Emacs, FreeBSD, Git, jQuery, LaunchBar, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Python, Review Board, S3, SQLite, Sublime Text, Ubuntu Linux

Spam Report

At least 236525 pieces of comment spam killed since 2008, mostly via Akismet.

PHP and view/controller separation

Ironic that I find myself defending PHP at a point when I'm making a huge effort to move most of my web coding to Python, but I keep running across mini-rants along the lines of "PHP sucks because it mixes business logic into your HTML."

No, it doesn't.

It makes it possible, sure. But it's completely avoidable. As The Daily WTF can show you, it's possible to do screwy things in any language.

So remember:

PHP doesn't mix business logic and presentation -- people do.

Saturday, March 4th, 2006
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2 comments

Some related posts: Making your way from PHP to Python and Django • From PHP to Python • Advice on sequencing items in web interfaces? • Dabble DB • Moving the blog to Django • JavaScript and the thickening client • Let's play a game: BASIC vs. Ruby vs. Python vs. PHP • Quick, but not dirty, PHP • The Onion moves to Drupal • Django, Rails, and PHP
• Comment from miguev , 5 weeks later

Maybe you wouldn't like to answer me, but... how can I have view/controller separation with PHP a la Django?

• Comment from Paul , 5 weeks later

For PHP frameworks, there are a lot of choices. I haven't used any of them enough to make recommendations, but in this post I link to several of them and in this post I link to a directory with even more.

Comments are closed for this post. But I welcome questions/comments via email or Twitter.