E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

Book Project

I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

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This site is built on a fresh trunk checkout of Django, running on Python 2.5.1, served by Apache and mod_python. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive.

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A Django site.
(Finally!)

Copyright 2008
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

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
+ +
2 comments

Some related posts: From PHP to Python • Liking jQuery • 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.

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