E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Feel free to email me.

Book

Python Web Development with Django I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

Colophon

Built using Django, served by Apache and mod_wsgi. 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. The markup engine is Markdown.

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Stuff I Use

Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

Spam Report

At least 70644 pieces of comment spam killed since January 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][1] I link to several of them and in [this post][2] I link to a directory with even more.

[2]: http://e-scribe.com/news/228
[1]: http://e-scribe.com/news/159

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