Leendert Brouwer wrote in to tell us about the latest posting over on Cedric Otaku's weblog - a follow up to his "PHP Confessions from a Java Fiend" - Part 2.

In this second part of the series, he talks about PHP's support for two things: database access (somewhat strong) and web support (very strong). PHP interfaces with quite a few of the database systems out there, especially the popular MySQL, but PHP was created to be a web-based application language, and that's where its forte lies.

If you can put aside the mildly annoying asymmetry in the API (sometimes you invoke a function, other times it's a global array), PHP puts a lot of power in your hands with these simple API's, and making changes involving an alteration of a schema and the accompanying change in the business logic and the HTML can often be made in less than ten minutes.

The next task I'd like to tackle is to research a higher level of abstraction than what I have been looking at so far, such as template frameworks and database abstractions.

Keep an eye out here and here for this followup...