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Breakthrough: Java Implementation of PHP5

Wed, 03/14/2007 - 10:06.
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According to Caucho, you can run Drupal in Java now.

Following is the excerpt from Quercus website:

"Quercus is Caucho Technology's 100% Java implementation of PHP 5 released under the Open Source GPL license. Quercus comes with many PHP modules and extensions like PDF, PDO, MySQL, and JSON. Quercus allows for tight integration of Java services with PHP scripts, so using PHP with JMS or Grails is a quick and painless endeavor.

With Quercus, PHP applications automatically take advantage of Java application server features just as connection pooling and clustered sessions.

Quercus implements PHP 5 and a growing list of PHP extensions including APC, iconv, GD, gettext, JSON, MySQL, Oracle, PDF, and Postgres. Many popular PHP application will run as well as, if not better, than the standard PHP interpreter straight out of the box. The growing list of PHP software certified running on Quercus includes DokuWiki, Drupal, Gallery2, Joomla, Mambo, Mantis, MediaWiki, Phorum, phpBB, phpMyAdmin, PHP-Nuke, Wordpress and XOOPS."

This is very impressive. I am going to try installing Drupal over Quercus soon and share the experience.

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This make me wonder... How

Submitted by Leon (not verified) on Wed, 03/14/2007 - 14:46.

This make me wonder... How fast can it be? I mean, it does all the interpreting process in Java.

But it may be better, because Java can pre-compile PHP scripts to Java .class. So it can be faster than usual PHP! Not that I like the idea of having an interpreter in an interpreter, though. I will try installing Drupal on top of it too.

I would not be surprised

Submitted by irakli on Wed, 03/14/2007 - 19:10.

I know what you mean but to be fair - Java is not an "interpreter" and it has been demonstrated in many different tests that in numerous cases, Java code can be faster than C/C++ code. The explanation is easy: JVM authors have written much more performant and efficient threading and memory-management implementations than an average C/C++ programmer would in an average program. In addition, Apache integration with even mod_php is quite inefficient as far as performance and scalability goes. I won't be surprised if Caucho guys achieved better performance having everything nicely wrapped in JVM.

I guess we could compare Drupal Quercus and Drupal Zend installations and see how they compare. Then we will have a better idea ;)

In any case, most of the web applications I have seen are of Read-Most breed and their main bottleneck is always the database, not the actual code execution. It is definitely true for Drupal. Drupal is very database-heavy. Quercus apparently leverages JDBC with its beautiful pooling and whatnot so it may well get an advantage there.