[ikrima]

awesome; that's what i was looking for. And, I was also hoping to get advice on algorithmic or architecture knowledge on distributed web apps as opposed to specific details on languages.

Ex: How facebook scales to 500+ million users or how flickr can serve so many photos that fast. Obviously for my flickr app clone, I don't need that level of performance but I'd at least like some pointers on how to go about it the right way.

[kls]

Well Facebook uses PHP and HipHop which is an implementation that converts the PHP to C and compiles it as machine code as opposed to interpreted code. It is how they scale on PHP as for flicker they use PHP as well you may want to look at this document, it outlines the flicker architecture and what they did.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=2&s...

PHP is with out a doubt the most popular web 1.0 server side language, and if you are looking to do this as a job, then it is well worth it. Personally, I would rather jab my eyes out than work with another line of PHP. It was originally designed by a group of people that had neither extensive language experience nor web experience. It is kludged together and you feel it ever step of the way. Over time, people that do know what they are doing have fixed some of it, but there is still some crap legacy in it. I swore off PHP and will not take a contract that mandates it.

Now for the good part, it is fast to develop in, it has a lot of support, there is enough stuff built in it that you can find almost anything you need. Wordpress and Drupal are two of the most popular CMS systems and are written with PHP. You can build a site in 4hrs with either one and a template from one of the template sites. It's like crack of the web development world, cheap, dirty, powerful and it gives you want you want, but no ones admits to using it.