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Friday, January 7. 2011PHP in 2010 - a year in retrospective
Every year, for the past three years, Ibuildings has written a retrospective of the past twelve months in PHP. Looking back at last year's post, it amazes me how quickly what we were talking about is now passe. Was it only 2009 that Twitter became mainstream? Though not a heavy contributor to the 140-character medium, I find it one of the best ways to keep track of what's going on in the community. Did we only really have the last twelve months to enjoy Google Chrome? It seems to have been my choice of browser for far longer.
Changes in PHPLooking at some of the other points raised last year, it seems the predictions were right on the money about PHP 5.3. Certainly within Ibuildings, the drive towards namespacing has been eagerly pursued, with only existing code bases holding back implementation. Hopefully 2011 will see Zend Framework 2 launched, providing a backbone for more applications based around the features in 5.3. The announcement a few weeks ago that PHP 5.2 is now end of life was surprising, as I thought there would be a lingering period of two separate branches, so credit to the team in making that hard decision. I foresee the year ahead full of companies re-factoring code to use the new features. Zend recently released the new PHP 5.3 Certification, which is one way for developers to test their skills in 5.3 and prove they're familiar with the latest features. Oh, and once again PHP 6 failed to materialise - maybe in 2011? Though I suspect we will see more posts like this one before we see the near-mythical Unicode support we have been promised these many years. PHP in the wider world2010 was a great year for PHP. W3Techs reported by the end of the year that PHP was the dominating server-side language with over three quarters of all websites using it. Continuing the rise of PHP in the enterprise, Infoworld Bossie Awards went to Zend Framework, SugarCRM, Drupal and Wordpress, while Git also received the recognition it deserved - both with an award and with more and more enterprise clients adopting it. Special mention in 2010 should go to Magento, which has exploded within eCommerce. Our ecommerce arm, Session Digital, spoke and exhibited at the Ecommerce Expo in London in October, and we were flabbergasted by how popular Magento was amongst online retailers attending the event. The number of online retailers looking for more information on this incredibly popular application seems to be an indication that the economic downturn has made retailers look even harder into their ecommerce platform costs and consider lower-cost alternatives when replatforming. Continuing last year's trend, Microsoft have really taken any previous community criticism by the horns and improved their offering and involvement in PHP. WinCache has taken off and continues to grow in popularity alongside APC and memcached to improve application performance. Josh Holmes' keynote speech at PHP London, as well as Silverstripe becoming the first open source Web application to receive a Microsoft certification, shows a growing commitment to PHP. On the subject of conferences, the Dutch PHP Conference was once again a success, but interestingly two topics whispered about the most amongst the seething masses of the tech savvy were the NoSQL movement and HipHop. Quite a few developers used the free Wifi to download MongoDB and patch together Facebook's compiler-cum-Webserver over the three days. NoSQL appears to have really grown from just a concept to a real option for enterprise projects, and we're hoping to be involved in some concrete implementations this year. On a more hands-on level, companies seem to be embracing Agile PHP development at more than face value. To me, 2009 felt like a lot of managers and software teams wanted to sound as if they had "got it" by using SCRUM and talking about Agile... while under this veneer still being practitioners of waterfall methodology. There were a few occasions where companies demanded Agile development, and asked for Gantt charts as part of the deliverables. In 2010, the embrace of Agile methodology - or at least, the majority of it - seemed real, with software teams really buying into it (some quite fanatically). It was a refreshing situation to talk to developers and find they already had Continuous Integration tools such as Hudson in their development environments (and even Chuck Himself). ConclusionSo, once again, an interesting year with a lot going on for PHP. The trend of PHP becoming more mainstream seems to continue; PHP-based enterprise-grade solutions such as Magento and SugarCRM are great examples of this. With companies looking for further cost reductions and clever new ways of doing things, open source is often a viable option to help meet these goals. Our job, as the community, is to make sure PHP can meet the complex demands of its users. (If you want to know more about the open source projects the Ibuildings team gets involved in, check out techPortal, where we post tutorials and articles on the technologies we've been working on.) Share         Trackbacks
This Week’s Link List (January 7, 2011)
My first link list of 2001 picks up where 2010 left off – probably too long, but there was too
Weblog: Brian Swan
Tracked: Jan 07, 22:44 Comments
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Hey Barney, interesting article!
I'm really glad PHP is becoming the first choice when talking about technology that can do the job and lower costs. I think this year will be brighter for PHP, with the final stable releases of heavy weight frameworks like Symfony2 and Zend Framework 2, the adoption of PHP 5.3 will be higher. Even tough I was disappointed with the disolution of the PHP 6 branch, I was really excited about seeing Unicode as a first class citizen in PHP. Regards!
Hey Barney,
nice write-up. I'm glad someone took over the job of reviewing the year  Greetings, Ivo |
