Java and PHP are two popular languages used in web application development. It is not fair to compare them. Comparing java with PHP is similar to comparing apple with orange. Both have almost similar features. So we can’t able to mention one is better than other.
PHP is the short of ‘Personal Home Page’, but it now known as ‘Hypertext Preprocessor’. PHP is one of the first developed server-side scripting languages that can be embed inside html. It was originally developed by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. Now we have a PHP team for modifying and introducing new versions. They made it free under General Public License (GPL). You can download it freely from php.net.
PHP belong to unprofessional class of language. But it is good for people who own their own websites or for smaller companies. It is considered as the best tool developing small web applications or pages with a team of maximum three or four members. It is the most important advantage of PHP. It is because development was much faster, and you were less likely to step on your team member’s toes as you developed. It allows programmers not yet understand MVC architecture to build their web pages by querying a SQL. Moreover it is easy to study. It makes PHP the favorite language for programmers.
Initially PHP doesn’t have IDE or it doesn’t support OOPs. It was considered as one of the greatest drawback up to PHP 4.3. But with the introduction of PHP 5 these limitation are overcomes. Now it support OOPs or procedural programming and provides a varity of IDE like Eclipse or RSA. It doesn’t require variable declaration, it is optional like matlab. One of the greatest limitations of PHP is that it can be used for only server side programming, because it is less portable. And PHP is weakly and dynamically typed.
Java is the most popular general purpose programming language created by James Gosling at Sun Micro-systems in 1995. It has more than 10 million users. It belongs to stretchered class of language. Its syntax have similarity with C and C++. But it has a simpler object model. It is also released under General Purpose License (GPL). So it is free to download. You can download it from Java Devolopers.
Once of the most important feature is portability. Java applications are compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java Virtual Machine (JVM) regardless of computer architecture. This make JAVA to develop both clients based and server based applications. JAVA is strongly typed. It need variables to be declared. It has uniquely defined OOP. It makes it very powerful. Moreover it is supported by very large varity of IDE, which really simplify developer’s job. They are suitable for large projects have more than five members in development team. Java is complex in nature that makes development slow. But it can accurately fulfill the need.
Java seems to be the most common web language used in the corporate. Most of the cooperate applications are building using java. And suddenly switch to PHP is not possible. So when you step into some cooperate environment, you will surely need to deal with existing java applications. It becomes very hard if you don’t know basics of java. It would be the primary reason for corporations looked into Java developers.