Peter Wayner wrote on InfoWorld an article titled “PHP vs. Node.js: An epic battle for developer mind share“, sharing developers opinions on who’s better PHP vs NodeJs ? First question that come to our mind is why comparing PHP and not any other programming language, most probably because they both have the same purpose or target the same developers if we can say.

Comparing PHP to NodeJs is like comparing Pizza to a Hamburger : They can both satisfy your hunger, while they are two different things with few similar ingredients.  NodeJs does not need a web server to run, which is not the case for PHP. One allow to run PHP code in the server-side, and the other JavaScript. It’s true that by using NodeJs you don’t have to learn a new language since it’s plain JavaScript, however you have to learn how to write server-side JavaScript and that’s a totally different thing.

This have been said, the choice of the programming language is a decision which should consider not only the performance of the languages, but also the availability of the developers, salary range, allocated budget … etc.

The table below resumes PHP and NodeJs wins as explained in the article :

 PHP Wins  NodeJs Wins
 Mixing code with content  Separating concerns
 Deep code base  Newer code means more modern features
 Simplicity (sort of)  Complexity of closures and more
 No client app needed  Service calls are thinner than HTML-fat PHP calls
 SQL  JSON
 Speed of coding  Raw speed

 

7 COMMENTS

      • You’re right, but if we talk about language capabilities, then PHP is able to run without an external web server. Even if this is not suitable for most of real applications (that are, of course, web applications), this means that you can write a standalone application in PHP, e.g. an application meant to run on a single client.

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