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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. Continue reading "PHP in 2010 - a year in retrospective" Thursday, August 19. 2010Supporting a PHP migrationRecently PHP.net announced, with their latest PHP 5.2.14 release, the end of active development of the PHP 5.2 branch. End of active development means that there will be no more new features or bug-fixes released in the current 5.2 version, and users are encouraged to move to the latest 5.3 branch of PHP. However, security updates will be considered on a case-by-case basis. According to a recent Twitter poll, we found that over 50% of developers are already working with the latest 5.3 release. An additional 35% is already in the process of migrating to 5.3. This means that the majority of developers see the importance of upgrading and are already taking action, well before PHP's announcement. (We are aware, though, that we are surrounded by a particularly well-educated group of hard-core community people, so these results might be slightly skewed.) Continue reading "Supporting a PHP migration" Wednesday, June 2. 2010Integrating PHP And JavaPHP and Java are both languages with reputations for getting things done, and there are plenty of reasons for combining the two, particularly in an Enterprise environment. The most common situation is for an organisation with an existing Java infrastructure to want to develop PHP projects, for all the reasons any enterprise would choose PHP, such as speed of development, cost, desire to use specific open source applications, or availability of staff. Often this is inspired by an internal group who has started using Drupal, MediaWiki, Wordpress or similar to great effect, but without the integration to the rest of the organisation's infrastructure that would be needed for a full scale roll out. There are many reasons to want to integrate these new developments with Java rather than just creating a separate silo - existing libraries or systems that would be difficult or expensive to replicate, well-tested systems providing key functionality, and an existing team of developers are just a few. So, the best way is often to mix and match the two - which is easier than it might first appear. Continue reading "Integrating PHP And Java" Friday, February 12. 2010Productivity in PHP from a fun perspective
One of the reasons so many people choose PHP for their web development is that it's fast. Not necessarily in the gazillion-requests-per-second sense, but in terms of developer productivity. One sentence you'll hear me say regularly is: "PHP is not pretty, but it gets the thing done, and gets it done well" and even in my 'PHP in the Enterprise' evangelization, the productivity argument is one I often use.
Every once in a while things happen that prove this point, and this is a post about such proof. Continue reading "Productivity in PHP from a fun perspective"
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Tuesday, January 5. 2010PHP in 2009 - A year in retrospective
2009 just ended, and since we've only just commenced work in 2010, there's still time to look back at 2009 and see what events have shaped the way we work with PHP and what happened in the general PHP ecosystem. PHPdeveloper.org has a nice overview from a community perspective. I'll cover some community aspects briefly as well, but will focus on the broader PHP ecosystem, including its adoption in the enterprise and industry participation.
Continue reading "PHP in 2009 - A year in retrospective" Monday, September 21. 2009PHP enters top 3 of most popular programming languages
The company TIOBE, founded in 2000, is involved heavily with Software Quality. They call themselves 'the coding standards company' and deliver tools to assess the quality of software by checking coding standards, among other things. Unfortunately, despite the fact that their website is written in PHP, they do not support PHP yet with their tools (at least as far as I can tell from their website), but they have one activity that is of interest to us in the PHP ecosystem: they collect statistics on the popularity of programming languages and have been doing this for a few years now.
In their latest analysis PHP has entered the top 3 of most popular programming languages, and that is something that both makes us proud and provides further proof that PHP is still growing and here to stay. Continue reading "PHP enters top 3 of most popular programming languages" Monday, August 10. 2009A look at the PHP job market
Last week, Cal Evans had an interesting post on this blog about an EDC study on the popularity of programming languages. In the comment section of that post, I had an interesting discussion with Bill Karwin, who suggested that when looking at the job market, PHP still seems less popular than other languages. It is not a surprise that Java and .NET have more jobs, considering they are general purpose languages while PHP's focus is on the web alone.
Later that week, I stumbled across an interesting press release by CV Screen on the job market in the UK. I'm not sure how easily this report translates to the rest of the world (comments are welcome), but since I can see similar trends in other countries, I thought I'd share it nonetheless. Continue reading "A look at the PHP job market" Tuesday, August 4. 2009PHP Rated Top Scripting Language by Evans Data Corp
In their recently released report "Users' Choice: Scripting Language Ratings", Evans Data Corporation (no relation to the author of this article) gave PHP the highest overall ranking of the languages they included in their survey.
The full EDC report can be downloaded here (requires free registration). Talking with 500 developers who actively use scripting languages, EDC ranked the languages on the following criteria. For each category, we've listed how PHP fared:
Continue reading "PHP Rated Top Scripting Language by Evans Data Corp" Thursday, May 7. 2009TestFest 2009
The PHP TestFest is a gathering by PHP enthusiasts that get together to write automated test cases for PHP. These test cases help prevent future incompatibilities and bugs in PHP. The event has grown global over the course of the years, with user groups everywhere in the world participating.
Continue reading "TestFest 2009" Tuesday, May 5. 2009PHP is NOW
PHP is at an inflection point. We are at a once in a lifetime place where several factors are coming together to help boost the profile of PHP up and above the "scripting language" label and into a serious tool for enterprise development.
Many developers inside the PHP community have looked at PHP as serious development tool for years. Major companies like Digg, Expedia, Yahoo and facebook are trotted out during every discussion of PHP to prove what a useful tool PHP is. However, companies like Ladbrokes, Channel Five, Fiat, Panasonic, and the BBC, all use PHP as not only their backend glue language but for serious, enterprise level, transactional workflow systems. In a growing number of large development shops, PHP has gone from "why" to "why not". Continue reading "PHP is NOW"
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