PHP in ColdFusion
It just keeps getting better and better for ColdFusion. Sean Corfield posts about using PHP in your ColdFusion pages. Check it out!
So why would you use this? ColdFusion gives you everything you need and more then PHP and is much more productive, we all know that. But, one thing that CF always got criticized for was the lack of open source applications. With this ability you the CF developer can now grab free PHP apps and integrate them with CF very easily. In fact, PHP can now see CF variables, and CF can see PHP variables. Both the CFML and PHP code are compiled down to java byte code.
"ColdFusion gives you everything you need and more then PHP and is much more productive, we all know that."
Consider me one of the uneducated in that regard. As a professional developer fluent in both languages, PHP is far superior to CF, hands down. Maybe that's why CF now has the abillty to leverage PHP.
"far superior, hands down" is a bit absolutist and overly vague - especially in response to a post that speaks of how the two languages can now cooperate. A professional uses the right tool for the job - this post was merely pointing out the ability to leverage each at the appropriate time.
Well not to open a language war either, those debates online never go anywhere.
In terms of CF being able to use PHP, its really not a CF thing nor was it created to give CF any PHP capabilities. There is a module called Quercus that allows you to use the PHP language, but at runtime your PHP code gets compiled into Java Byte Code. So if I have a page of CFML and PHP, in the end it gets compiled down to Java. The benefits of this for PHP are the following according to the developers.
Security: since Quercus and its modules are entirely in Java, C pointer overruns and segmentation violations are no longer possible.
Scalability: PHP programs can take advantage of distributed sessions in PHP and load balancing.
Performance: Quercus outperforms a straight mod_php implementation by about 4x (for Mediawiki and Drupal). Quercus roughly matches PHP performance with accelerators like APC.
Caching: PHP applications using Quercus can immediately take advantage of Resin's proxy caching. They can also use the PHP APC caching API since the APC functions are included with Quercus.
Connection pooling, transactions, JMS: PHP programs using Quercus automatically take advantage of Resin's connection pooling, and can use the full distributation transactions, and Java capabilities like JMS.
Java tools: PHP developers can use Java tools like profilers to get in-depth information about the PHP program performance.
If saying PHP is better then CF, are you talking about the languages, that PHP code is better to write, or more understandable then CFML? Is PHP more powerful then Java?
This really leads into discussions about C versus Java, compiled versus interpreted.
All languages are tools in a developers kit, sometimes one tool addresses a particular problem better then another. Sometimes you need more then one tool for the job (CF & PHP), this solution simply lets you use two powerful tools together.