Changes in PHP

2011 was another great year for PHP. W3Techs reported that over 77% of all websites are now written in PHP. More of these sites are entering into the top 1 million sites than this time last year. 13 out of the 14 top Content Management Systems are written in PHP, which is adding to the growth of PHP in this area.

PHP 5.4 made it to a release candidate status in November 2011 bringing some welcome changes to the language. Small tweaks to the syntax include class member access on instantiation and array dereferencing, multibyte support by default, short array syntax, and many others - but one of the big new "headline" features is that of traits, an OO model for constructing classes that avoids the problems caused by the overuse of inheritance. It's great to see a mix of syntax improvements balanced out with useful new language features - a sure sign that PHP is maturing and headed in the right direction.

During July, the first stable version of Symfony 2 was released requiring a minimum version of PHP 5.3. Zend Framework 2.0 hit its beta phase in 2011, which is also built on version 5.3 of PHP. These version requirements will start to really phase out development of new projects on hosts who are stuck on versions of PHP that are no longer supported (5.2 went end of life in December 2010), which can only be a good thing for the advancement of PHP around the globe.

PHP in the Community

A cool development in 2011 was the announcement by Facebook of their PHP Virtual Machine hhvm (HipHop Virtual Machine). Although our customers are not trying to solve the same capacity problems that Facebook contend with, it is really interesting to see how PHP is developing in this area with more and more enterprises looking to the PHP language to solve problems on very high traffic sites.

PHP community activities remain buoyant globally, and Ibuildings continue to support events,  having had a number of speakers throughout the year at different conferences. We delivered content at PHPNW, PHPBenelux, Dutch PHP Conference, PHP Barcelona, 4Developers (Poland), Magento Imagine and Magento Developers Paradise. Members of the Ibuildings team will be presenting at many of the conferences during 2012. If you see them, don't be shy, say hi!

As the PHP community continues to grow, the UK PHP conferences are expanding with extra days and larger venues to support the ever increasing interest. This is also attracting more and more international speakers travelling to present.

Open Source Projects

Behaviour Driven-Development (BDD) seemed to gain some traction with both PHPSpec gaining a new lead developer and pushing out some long awaited new features. Behat has also been hitting the headlines throughout 2011 as a BDD framework based on Ruby's "Cucumber" project and follows the same Gherkin syntax. PHPUnit has been the de facto testing solution for a number of years now, but new and good alternatives to the xUnit way of testing are starting to emerge onto the scene by way of these new developments.

A number of turnkey scalable hosting solutions have emerged during 2011. The type of service that had formally been available for Ruby projects has been created with a PHP focus - allowing you to develop an application and leave the infrastructure and scalable hosting to the service operators. Services such as https://phpfog.com/ and http://orchestra.io/ have quickly emerged with great services and have eagerly been adopted. This culminated in the acquisition of orchestra.io by Engine Yard the leading proponent of these services in the Ruby space.

In 2011, eBay acquired Magento to form part of X.commerce, a range of products and services that will facilitate innovation and expand the opportunities to develop integrated commerce solutions that link on-line and off-line channels. This acquisition could be viewed as a negative step for an open source product but early suggestions show otherwise. X.com will continue to support the open source edition of Magento and many of the other parts of the platform are also being released with an open source licence. These developments will give Magento even more credibility within the commerce space and allow PHP to be at the heart of major enterprise commerce.

Predictions for 2012

Framework Convergence

Many of the PHP frameworks appear to be converging on similar strategies. Each evolving into a second or third generation maintaining a full application stack but providing developers with greater flexibility to select only the components they require. There has already been discussion of "traditional" framework features, like the class loader moving into the PHP core. Or even to just use a micro framework with a smaller feature set but much lighter and quicker to deploy.

We want to understand what frameworks the professionals out there are using. Simply tweet your favourite framework along with this hashtag -> #topPHPframework 

Dependency Injection Containers

Dependency injection and Injection Containers will be part of the larger frameworks in their next releases. During 2011 there has been much debate about decoupling of dependencies and there are many strategies to accomplish this. However 2012 is likely to see Dependency Injection Containers become common place for more and more PHP projects and developers.

Serious Caching

Ibuildings have proven on a number of projects that open source software can scale and perform for every application. We have deployed Varnish HTTP accelerator for a number of clients including some large Magento clients. We expect Varnish to become a de facto element of many future projects. Many of the open source frameworks are building in support for gateway caches such as Varnish.

What are your predictions, what do you expect to see in 2012?

Contributors: Ben Longden, Rowan Merewood and Alistair Stead