Hi Bongo,
Also first welcome to Servoy.
I can't tell you much about the difference between PHP and Servoy because I don't use PHP. But I can tell you about my experiences with other technologies out there.
I use
Lasso Professional and now JSP (in combination with Servoy Headless Client).
I tend to like Lasso a lot because it's a nice compact (though very readable) language that allows you to write web-based solutions in no-time.
Mainly because it's so compact (and consistent) and secure out of the box. It's actually the reason why I choose it over other technologies in the first place.
But JSP is not only a language, it comes with a very smart server (Apache Tomcat) as well.
And with smart I mean smart caching.
With most technologies the server-side code is interpreted each time that page is accessed. Not so with JSP. It sort of compiles and compresses it the first time it is called and stores it on disk for the next time it is called again. This makes it very fast and of course less load on the server.
Next to all this is VERY scalable, very extensible and very secure out of the box.
Now lets talk about the combination JSP and Servoy (Headless Client).
When you make solutions in Servoy you usually put a lot of business rules in such a solution.
When you want to publish this solution (or part of it) also on the web then you usually write those business rules twice. Not so with JSP/Servoy Headless Client.
With JSP you can call methods inside your solution through the Servoy Headless Client (SHC). So you can reuse your business rules (and code).
And when you read this thread on the SHC forum (
http://forum.servoy.com/viewtopic.php?t=3665) you can read that in the (near?) future you don't have to code any JSP with Servoy Instant Publishing (SIP).
One thing is though that using SHC you do use a Servoy Client license per session. These cost money.
But depending on the size of your website you save so much time developing that you actually save money.
I hope this gives you some better idea on what Servoy can do for you in comparison with other web technologies out there.
swingman wrote:Another interesting possibily I haven't tested myself is using PHP to script the PostgreSQL database.
I don't think that has much to do with websites and/or HTML. It's just another language (out of a growing list) that you can use for stored procedures in PostgreSQL.
Still very cool though.