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Is there a reason regarding the goals of these sites of using PHP? I mean is it PHP/MySQL is the most suitable tools to run these sites or is it the reason because no other languages but PHP were shine during the beginning of these projects?

What is the main reason those known projects are run on PHP/MySQL? Why did they choose them?

Cheers.

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Coding Horror ... – Job Nov 29 at 4:17
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imho, because those projects were started by individuals or small groups who happened to be familiar with and comfortable with PHP/MySQL. – Carson63000 Nov 29 at 5:12
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in my country servers capable of hosting PHP are a lot cheaper than those that can support java(jsps j2ee) this could also hv been a reason – kantu Nov 29 at 7:19
@Carson63000 - Yep. When most people start out on a project unless the language they know best is completely inappropriate, that's what they'll code in. – Jon Hopkins Nov 29 at 8:48
Many times even when the language is inappropriate they'll still go that route. :-( – Brian Knoblauch Nov 29 at 19:12

5 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

I imagine that many of these projects started out very small and used a LAMP stack. Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP are free.

I like the answer to this question here: Why do so few large websites run a Microsoft stack?

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This was my understanding as well. – Darknight Nov 29 at 10:05
up vote 2 down vote

Popularity

With that popularity comes the flexibility to leverage community created software to further your own application. You also get a huge pool of people with which you can work with when creating your application. Large community size gives you additional support. Facebook in particular has returned a large amount of code to both the PHP and MySQL projects.

PHP is also very hard to move away from. If you start your application it is difficult to move it to something more "enterprisey" like J2EE or .NET. You end up extending the existing application. With PHP, MySQL, and Apache being generally free software it becomes very easy to hit the ground running cheaply with minimal overhead.

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JoshK: is it easier to move from J2EE ? – Pierre 303 Nov 29 at 7:27
@Pierre: I don't think it's easy to move away from anything. – Josh K Nov 29 at 14:14
@Josh: yes resistance is pretty universal ;) – Pierre 303 Nov 29 at 14:24
up vote 2 down vote

Ubiquity

Particularly with Wordpress and vBulletin, because they're sold as packaged software, if they had chosen a Microsoft-only software stack, they would have immediately restricted their possible audience to only those who are able to run Microsoft products. PHP and MySQL run everywhere, including on IIS. .NET does run on Linux (with mono) but until relatively recently, .NET on mono was rather painful, compared to PHP on IIS. SQL Server obviously only runs on Windows.

So if you're developing packaged software like vBulletin or Wordpress, it makes sense to use PHP+MySQL so that your possible audience is a large as possible, regardless of the relative merits of PHP/MySQL vs. .NET/SQL Server.

Facebook is different, because they don't sell a packaged version of their software, obviously. But others have, I believe, answered that question already.

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up vote 1 down vote

The PHP/MySQL combination is very prevalent for a number of reasons: cost, availability, resources, popularity...It's not necessarily the best choice, but it is quite flexible and powerful.

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up vote 0 down vote

Programmer availability and suitability for the task. PHP is for websites and they thought their products are nothing but extensible websites, they choose the technologies best suited for that.

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