Hacker News Reader

Comment by ch0wn | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. This is not a feature of PHP, but simply CGI.

It's a feature of PHP because PHP isn't a compiled language. C, Java, anything .NET... They all require an added step in the middle.

You haven't done much asp.net development I take it?

Not for many years, no. I'd forgotten about it.

Still surprised I got voted down for that, since C and Java are still correct.

In fact, it's what I hated about Java web development the most... You had to compile, package, and deploy every time you made a tiny change. It was a nightmare.

Even in some parts of the Java world, that problem doesn't exist anymore.

The Play framework uses its own copy of the Eclipse compiler to compile everything on the fly while it is running in development mode...so as you as you save your changes, you can reload your browser and see them immediately.

There are frameworks for Java that doesn't require you to compile / package / deploy for each change. One example of this is http://www.playframework.org/

in .net you can run your site off source files, and the server will compile as needed

It's slower, right? I remember some years ago it would take like 5 seconds on this kind of big web app to show me the newer version of the file I just changed.

In production, or just your dev environment?

You technically can compile ASP pages on the fly in production but it's bad practice, just like making changes directly to production is bad practice. The whole blog post is pretty much a great write up of how not to manage a website.

He was talking about small sites, in which case a deploy script, etc. is probably more trouble than it's worth.

Was I incorrect that he was talking about small sites, or do people just believe that every site regardless of size should use a deploy script and the other trappings of large application/high volume production development? Because the latter is silly.

He was but I don't think that's a valid excuse.

Doing a tested change and then a pushing to production is a 4 command overhead using git as lazily as possible with maybe an additional 5 minutes spent during initial project setup. You're doing the same coding work, you're just helping to ensure it's not going to create any completely useless work spent undoing mistakes. It's an ounce of prevention, pound of cure argument in my mind.

It's really not that clear cut. To do what you propose, you either have to set up an identical staging environment, or you have to set up a local environment that mimics (and stays in sync with!) the production environment. For a tiny site that sees <100 people a day, where the potential damage of a mistake is absurdly low (so what if 5 people see the broken version while you make corrections?) it's not necessarily worth the additional hassle.

This all depends on what kind of site it is, of course, but in the context of what he's saying, it makes sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com