Now that you have a rough idea of what the PHP/Oracle combination has to offer, it is worth taking a moment to familiarize yourself with some other popular combinations that can be used as alternatives to PHP and Oracle. Exploring such alternatives, including their advantages and disadvantages, can help you understand better whether PHP and Oracle best suit your needs or there is another combination that suits your needs better.
Although PHP supports all the major relational databases, including commercial ones such as IBM's DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, an open-source database, is still a popular choice among PHP developers. The major reason behind MySQL's popularity is that it is completely free under the GPL license.
Of those based on Oracle, JSF and Oracle is probably one of the most powerful combinations available. To make JSF/Oracle application development easier, Oracle offers ADF Faces, a fully compliant JSF component library including over 100 JSF components.
MySQL is extremely popular among the open‑source community that uses PHP. There are several reasons behind MySQL's popularity among PHP developers. The most significant ones are as follows:
Completely free under the GPL license
Low Total Cost of Ownership (TOC)
PHP natively supports MySQL—no additional modules are required
All these factors make MySQL a natural choice for web hosts providing support for PHP. However, you should realize that the PHP/MySQL combination is a good solution for small data-driven web applications whereas professional-quality applications require much more.
JavaServer Faces technology is a new server-side user interface (UI) component framework that is quickly becoming the standard web-application framework for J2EE applications. The biggest advantage of JavaServer Faces technology is that it enables web developers to apply the Model-View-Controller (MVC) principle, thus achieving a clean separation between the model and presentation layers of a web application. The entire user interaction with the application is handled by a front-end Faces servlet.
The only disadvantage the JSF and Oracle combination has compared to PHP and Oracle is that JavaServer Faces is a bit more difficult to learn than PHP.