Andy Chase

A few weeks ago I was working on a personal project, a web application that I put together using J2EE. (By no means is it an "Enterprise" application, but there's no other acronym that accurately summarizes "Servlets/JSP/Tomcat").

My web hosting company (Which does not offer Tomcat hosting as a service; they're strictly PHP/HTML) was even cool enough to let me run an instance of Tomcat on my account. The only problem is, Tomcat seems to get shut down every day and a half or so. There's probably some sort of daemon on the server that looks for weird processes and kills them, which is perfectly resaonable.

Since I'm not paying for Tomcat hosting, I don't think it would be fair of me to bug them about it; I need to either bite the bullet and pay to have my Java web app hosted someplace else, or rewrite it in PHP so I can just host the thing almost anywhere, and eventually even release it for widespread use.

I haven't done much of anything in PHP for a good year and a half, other than maintenance on existing applications that I wrote before that. I toyed with the idea of writing my own lightweight MVC framework in PHP, but didn't really relish the thought... it would be an interesting exercise, but really more than I want to take on for this relatively simple project. At the same time, I don't want to rebuild this application as a set of "throw this in as I need it" PHP scripts.

So I started searching for an MVC PHP framework, and came across CakePHP, which looks very encouraging... I haven't spent much time with it yet, but already I get the sense that my time would be much better spent learning the Cake framework than trying to write my own. It will be good to dust off my PHP brain cells, too, and familiarize myself with Eclipse (thanks to the PHPEclipse plugin.)

Tagged:

• php
• java
• webapplication
• framework
• mvc