PHP Just Grows And Grows (news.netcraft.com)

That being said, the PHP ini is a config file that defines some of PHP's runtime parameters and, in some cases, controls modules and drivers that have been installed for PHP. The closest thing I can think of comparing it to would be the JVM config.

I use PHP for a crapton of scripting as well, namely scraping, which has nothing to do with PHP's web app capabilities as that all leverages curl.

While obviously a bad practice, it also enables non-devs to organically learn the language in bits and pieces. Sometimes they move on to create hugely influential platforms like MediaWiki and Wordpress, sometimes they just build very hard to maintain websites. PHP in a nutshell.

    @$arr['key']

    $er = error_reporting(0);
    $arr['$key'];
    error_reporting($er);
    unset($er);

Heck, the second Google hit for "php mvc framework" for me was a 2009 guide to writing your own (talk about not getting the point of a framework). There were two more pages in the top ten for PHP MVC framework comparisons.

The GP is using a very well thought out configuration; this is using the right tool for the job incarnate. If I wasn't lacking in SQL department I would probably do exactly the same (probably replacing PHP with something strongly and maybe statically typed).

[1] SQL and XML seems a bit redundant, but I don't know what they are used for exactly. Also I lumped both SQL and XML together as "relational" because of XQuery, but I admit that I don't know much about the latter and this may be not accurate.

Using XML allows means the data associated with every "page" in the system automatically doubles as a service (SaaS). XSLT allows those those services to be translated into JSON, ASCII, PDF (via LaTeX), XML, or the format du jour. With this architecture, the amount of time to publish a new export format for every "page" in the system is reduced to the time it takes to write a new XSL template: hours to a few days.

All pages can reuse the same code to render themselves:

    $data = get_xml( $id );
    $xml  = get_xml_dom( $data );
    $xsl  = get_xsl_dom( $stylesheet );
    $proc = get_xslt_processor( $id, xsl );

    echo $proc->transformToXML( $xml );

.Net languages aren't immune to this either, particularly Windows.Forms and ASP.net. To write decent code in those, you basically have to fight the IDE and the framework every step of the way. ASP.net MVC makes it much easier to write good code, at the cost of being harder to user if you don't already know what to do. Your average newbie can't just point and click until he's half way there.

PHP has decent frameworks, like Symfony. They make it much easier to do the right thing, and harder to do the wrong thing, at the cost of being more difficult to learn.

Props to the Symfony team though. They're still trying to make something good out of PHP long after most other decent developers abandoned the platform on favour of something less newbie-driven. It helps a lot to have that kind of framework available, just in case I have to use PHP for something.

Edit: Accidentally said that ASP.Net MVC encouraged bad code, but meant it encouraged good code.