First of all, why not? Everything else can run on the jvm (yes… even c#), so why not php? Well… I certainly don’t see why not… Java is a fairly robust language with a pile of different libraries and (as you saw if you clicked on any of those links) languages that can run on it. It is ideal!

Don’t like php’s random function? Why not use Java’s? Not your cup of tea? Use ruby’s instead, or python’s, or  write one in COBOL if you are really brave.

It also means that you can implement the functionality in Java, the database transactions in Ruby, then write all of the presentation in PHP, no clearer MVC separation than that eh? Admitedly it might get a bit confusing and I may be over exaggerating about the possibility of these implementation’s cross communication abilities… but it would be great if you could (I might test it later…).

http://www.caucho.com/resin-3.0/quercus/index.xtp

Go check it out!

So, since my desktop got fried and will barely boot into Linux, I figured it was time to check out Visual Studio 2005 (which my dad gave me at Christmas time). Installed with no problem, other than finding the key that I was given. It then decided that it needed a number of updates, so I let it do its thing, and eventually I was greeted with this:

Nice clean, and it started up faster than eclipse or Netbeans, though it is out dated by comparison. I decided that I wanted to write a quick hello world application, so I created a C# Project (or ’solution’ as it is referred to in some locations). And was greeted with this:

Also nice and clean, so far so good. It looks like a lot of code to write a small program though. Strange that System needs to be added via ‘using’ which I am assuming is similar to an import. Fair enough, it does it for me so I am not really that bothered by it. Now what do I type to print stuff out… hmmm… Since it is a console program, perhaps it is console (the first thing that showed up using code completion, fancy that).

It makes sense, and there is a description of it right there and everything. How convenient.

Console.WriteLine("Howdy World");

There we go, run it and woah, that was fast, no pausing on debug apparently. Should probably make it wait a second so that I can see what is going on in the console.
After looking around on the Internet a little, I found that you do that by:

System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(3000);

So without further ado, here is a screen shot of the running program:

That wasn’t so bad, I guess I could get used to the weird redundancies of the language. Its sort of like java I guess.

If you want to run my totally awesome program, here it is:

Howdy World.exe

Edit

And there is why we don’t like Microsoft, its so obtrusive… Installing VS 2005 has removed all of my previous java file associations. They are now associated with j# files… grrr…