PHP for android (phpforandroid.net)

43 points by nands ↗ HN
PHP for Android project (PFA) aims to make PHP development in Android not only possible but also feasible providing tools and documentation.

25 comments

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Disturbing yet wonderful logo...
I think it should be the other way around. Elephant with an android hat, since the inners are PHP but the outside is android.
It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.
and of course Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre who wore the skin masks of his victims to help take on their personality.
An elephant mask on an robot/alien? Whatever happened to humans..
Yikes...property values are going down. PHP has moved in.
why?
Not sure why you were voted down here. I have the same question. And I looked around their website and couldn't find anything.

There isn't even a statement of who or how one would benefit from something like this.

Their homepage badly needs a mission statement, or a "Welcome, PHP for Android is for those who...... something"

That being said, I think I may understand a little as to the "why" by looking at the scripts that are on the site.

It appears that this is for people who just like coding in PHP and would like to use that language when coding for Android..... I think. It's about the language.

I am probably going to test it out. I'm wondering if the apps written using this exist entirely inside an embedded browser. That might be interesting.

When someone asks "why?" to something, I almost always think "Why not?" Is there a good reason you shouldn't play with Ruby, Scala or Python on Android? If so, why not PHP?
Because php isn't a general purpose language. It's a rather clunky hammer outside of the web.
Your answer sounds a lot like "Because $language is better" and there are no winners of holy wars.
Wake me up when you finish writing a payroll system in awk...
Wake me up when you finish writing one in any language.
There is a non-trivial chance I had already written one before you were born.
$language is better depending on the circumstances. PHP is very good for building small websites, I'd say almost ideal in some ways. Whether or not it works well in other fields is debatable. (Note: large companies using it successfully is not a good measure of something working well.)

Additionally PHP is inherently slow not because of the interpreter but because of the design the language. Most websites aren't affected by this because many of the functions in the standard library are implemented in C and are very fast.

At least one person is benefiting from this, having fun & gaining experience by creating this project.

Other people might benefit too, or perhaps not. There's no extra charge.

A lot of times, programmers do things that many people might find pointless... I don't know how many different "new operating systems" or "new programming languages" I saw come from the CS Department in 9 years spent working at a college. At least there's a snowball's chance in hell more than 2 people in the whole world will ever want to use PHP on Android.
PHP pinups of elephants on scantily clad women is not a great way to promote this. Really do not want.
The pinups have nothing to do with the PHP Android project. I was just explaining where the elephant came from. Vincent happens to also like drawing scantily clad women, but the PHP Android project is just using the elephant.
I'll start this off disclaiming that I've used PHP for a long time now and I like it. However, I don't understand why PHP should be beaten into a form it was never meant to be in.

I do like the logo though.

Using X the way it wasn't meant for is the definition of hacking.
Yes, but there has to be a certain elegance to it I can't quite see here.

Hammering screws is not hacking.