PHP: tinggalkan PHP pindah ke python
Sumber: http://techblog.stickyworld.com/abandoning-php-for-python.html
Abandoning PHP for Python
I was always told to use the right tool for the job. After 12 years of working with PHP I'm still trying to understand what it's well-suited for.
Back in early 2011 I was working for a financial data provider in London. I was working on a large, LAMP-based, client-facing project. In any file of the codebase you could find HTML, PHP, SQL, some ORM usage, JavaScript and in some directories you'd find large amounts of files with no content at all.
A lot of hands had created a lot of code. The technical architecture of the code could change with a developer simply deciding to do things in a different way from the rest of the team. I quickly grew tired of cherry-picked design patterns being sprinkled over what was already very inconsistent code. With 3-4 programming languages in a single file formatting and good syntax were often thrown out the window.
I sat by a few developers who were into using Python in their spare time and really liked it's simplicity. At the same time I was seeing a lot of Ruby on Rails and Django projects being open-sourced. Everything had it's place and there was a place for everything. The syntax of the code was incredibly clear in both frameworks. There was magic to help remove complexity. I felt like I was missing something in life. I wanted to be able to feel like I was in control of a clean and well-thought out codebase.
This is the story of what key learnings I came across that helped me become a Pythonist. Python Essential Reference
The first book I picked up was Python Essential Reference. It was written for people who already know how to write software. The content density and noise-to-signal ratio of this book is incredible. When I became a Python contractor this book sat next to my MacBook Pro every day for some time. Community-wide style guidelines
I quickly found myself reading through PEP-8 which is a widely-adopted style guide in the Python community. I could see the effect this guide had when I attended a two-day Python conference and everyone's code looked like one another's. There wasn't a context switch every time I saw a new codebase because the styling used was consistent with the community at large. Package Management
There is package management in PHP but I never found any code bases in the wild using it to the same extent as PIP. Being able to install, uninstall, upgrade and use a wide variety of sources for external and internal libraries was fantastic. When was the last time you looked at a PHP project and saw a list of all the third-party libraries and respective version numbers being used written in a single file?
It was around this point that I decided I'd rather be an unemployed Pythonist than an employed LAMP developer. Django's first tutorial
The first tutorial the Django project introduces you to on their website is golden. I can't say it was very easy the first time around as I was learning a lot as I was going through it. It probably took me two separate, four-hour sessions to get the example poll app up, create an admin and re-do the process in order to reasonably understand each step. This is probably the most career-enhancing tutorial I've ever completed. RESTful and DRY
Building RESTful client libraries in Python was a real treat. Instagram came out with Python bindings around the time I was beginning to use the language. They used a very dry method of describing each endpoint which this piece of magic would take as parameters. It wraps up so much complexity into simple interfaces and made their service calls feel very Pythonic. Evented Codebases
I never came across anything in the evented space in PHP in the years I worked as a LAMP developer. I knew node.js did a good job in this area but when I came across Tornado's Asynchronous HTTP client and Redis bindings for tornado I knew I could build some very low-latency, low-line count backends in Python that worked in an asynchronous fashion.
I've built backends that do authentication, query a few million rows in Solr and return JSON in a couple of milliseconds thanks to Python. Get started and get code out the door
If you're getting started with Django today I'd recommend building your first project on Cloud9. They've done a good job of putting together an online text editor, command line and virtual environment. It'll save you a lot of time doing installs and setups on your own machine.
Once your project is ready to go out Linode and Digital Ocean are pretty solid places to host your code. You can spin up an Ubuntu 13 instance and run the following to get your environment up:
$ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install build-essential curl git-core \ libevent-2.0-5 libevent-dev libmysqlclient-dev libssl-dev \ libtool libxslt-dev linux-kernel-headers lsof mysql-server \ nginx python-dev python-pip python-virtualenv rabbitmq-server \ redis-server s3cmd screen supervisor unzip uuid-dev \ virtualenvwrapper zip zlib1g-dev
The details around deployments, configuration and security settings I'll save for another blog post.
If any of the above resonates please do get in touch, we're always on the lookout for passionate Pythonists.