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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Items by Ibuildings Blog
Planet PHP
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Productivity in PHP from a fun perspective
Posted: February 12th, 2010, 12:25am MST by Ibuildings Blog
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PHP in 2009 - A year in retrospective
Posted: January 4th, 2010, 4:09pm MST by Ibuildings Blog
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" -
PHP enters top 3 of most popular programming languages
Posted: September 21st, 2009, 3:45am MDT by Ibuildings Blog
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.
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Oh Be Careful Little Eyes What You See
Posted: September 11th, 2009, 6:57am MDT by Ibuildings Blog
The children's Bible song starts off with the line "Oh be careful little eyes what you see". Regardless of whether you agree with the religious doctrine behind the song, the advice from the first line is, none-the-less, applicable to the PHP community these days.
The web has made it easy for anyone to become an instant pundit, regardless of their background. The tools exist so that anyone can quickly and easily publish anything and call it a fact. Nowhere is this problem more visible than in the software development community at large and the PHP community in specific.
Continue reading "Oh Be Careful Little Eyes What You See" -
Migrating a dev team to an OO team (Part 1)
Posted: September 7th, 2009, 8:57am MDT by Ibuildings Blog
For many years Object Oriented Programming was rare in the PHP world. Many PHP programmers donât know OO simply because PHP isn't natively an OO language. But with PHP5, PHP really entered the world of objects.
Still many PHP programmers feel that OO is too much for PHP. They don't see the benefits of object oriented programming. This is the start of a series of blog posts to investigate the topic.
Continue reading "Migrating a dev team to an OO team (Part 1)" -
PHP North West 2009
Posted: September 2nd, 2009, 9:55am MDT by Ibuildings Blog
10th October 2009 sees the second annual PHP Conference to be held in Manchester, PHP North West. As one of the organisers I've been watching the arrangements come together with growing excitement: this year we have a new venue, a schedule literally packed with excellent sessions, plenty of social activity, and some community-driven input on Sunday morning - I'll even be speaking myself this year. Some of the topics at this year's conference include various PHP frameworks, performance, Drupal, project management, and much more.
The conference is a regional event aimed at PHP developers of all levels as well as their managers, coming together and exchanging ideas around developing PHP within teams today. Our attendees range from those living locally or making a daytrip of it right across to speakers and attendees flying in from mainland Europe. We're very grateful to all our sponsors, they've stepped up to get involved even in the difficult economic climate and without them this entirely volunteer-organised conference simply couldn't happen.
Continue reading "PHP North West 2009" -
DPC 2009 Day 1
Posted: July 3rd, 2009, 6:18am MDT by Ibuildings Blog
After my colleague Cal reviewed DPC's tutorial day, it's now my turn to look back at the first real conference day of 2009's Dutch PHP Conference.
The day started with a nice movie made by Almer and Norman after which Cal officially opened the Dutch PHP Conference and introduced Andrei Zmievski to do the opening keynote. Andrei gave an outline of developments in PHP including the changes we are going to see in future versions. Closures, namespaces, better garbage collection and a few more things are coming to PHP5.3, but I think this isn't new to most people. I haven't really read a lot on PHP6 yet other than Unicode, so the addition of traits, C# style getters and setters and scalar/return value type hinting were new to me. I think this was a nice talk to be the opening keynote, because other than just being infomrative the talk also had the right amount of humor with some examples of frustrated people reporting "bugs" and a setting for y2k compliance. I wasn't active in PHP 10 years ago, but it made me laugh when I heard that the y2k_compliance setting basically did nothing other than stop people asking about it.
Continue reading "DPC 2009 Day 1" -
PHP 5.3 from a development manager's perspective
Posted: July 1st, 2009, 8:58am MDT by Ibuildings Blog
Yesterday, the PHP community proudly announced that they have released PHP 5.3. While only the minor version number went up, this is still a significant release containing many new features. Maybe even more important than these new features are several features that have been deprecated. These are features that have been in PHP for legacy reasons, but best practices generally already advised against using them, and now the features are formally deprecated. In a future PHP version they will disappear entirely.
At our Techportal Cal Evans gave an overview of the important changes, to make migration easier for developers. In this post,I'm going to look at the migration from a less technical angle, and explain when migration to PHP 5.3 is a good idea and when not.
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DPC 2009 Day 0 - Stefan Esser's Security Crash Course
Posted: June 26th, 2009, 7:52am MDT by Ibuildings Blog
From the list of tutorials on Day One of DPC 2009, I chose to sit-in on Stefan Esser's Security Crash Course with the idea that it would be a good opportunity for a review. When he displayed one of his introductory slides about the topics he would be covering, there seemed to be no surprises: input filtering, XSS, CSRF, SQL injection, session management and PHP code inclusion and evaluation -- it was a fairly expected list of all those things in an application that can threaten at one time or another to come back and bite a developer on the back-end (or front-end too for that matter). Even though some of the topics on the list already suggested to me certain known risky situations and how to diffuse them, it didn't matter. I was here, after all, for a review, a reality-check, hoping that certain topics such as PHP code inclusion and evaluation would be made even clearer.
It worked like a charm, although, not immediately, not necessarily in that room on that day.
Continue reading "DPC 2009 Day 0 - Stefan Esser's Security Crash Course" -
Sessions at php|tek 2009
Posted: June 16th, 2009, 6:42am MDT by Ibuildings Blog
This year's php|tek conference was hosted by php|architect just outside Chicago in the US in mid-May. I attended this year as a speaker delivering a number of sessions, and was also able to attend the some of the other sessions on offer at the event. There were some particular highlights of the week.
The first session of the main conference was the opening keynote, "The Future of PHP 6" by Andrei Zmievski. The talk was great but will be forever remembered for Andrei's t-shirt which read "I ? Unicode". With the conference in full swing, we moved on to some of the more technical sessions.
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TestFest 2009
Posted: May 7th, 2009, 8:34am MDT by Ibuildings Blog
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.
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Surviving a plane crash - The nu.nl case study
Posted: April 23rd, 2009, 10:32am MDT by Ibuildings Blog
About 2 months ago, Erik Snoeijs posted a story about the NU.nl backend, a project we did for the largest news site in The Netherlands.
Back then, we already planned to write a follow up post about the front-end technology. Where the back-end focuses on flexibility and ease of use for the Nu.nl editors, the front-end focuses completely on very high performance and getting the news out to the site's readers as quickly as possible.
Continue reading "Surviving a plane crash - The nu.nl case study"