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PHP Usage in the Enterprise
acostin writes "Some open survey results were published about PHP usage in the enterprise on the InterAKT site. An alternative survey on the PHP open source mouvement can be found on Zend site. See how we've evaluated the PHP market size($$$), what people think about PHP as an alternative to Java and .NET, and what should be done in order to have your large clients adopt open source solutions."
PHP usage in the enterprise
that by the 23rd century they would have left PHP behind.
Or maybe it just shows the durability of opens source software.
The language as it has been in most of it's 4.x.x iteration has been just about fine. Good for quick slap em together websites and small applications. But...
.Net) where you can rely on the functionality of the objects without having to second guess the original developers.
I have seen huge cumbersome application servers built around PHP that are a nightmare to maintain without having intimate familiarity with the code of the application server, such as Ampoliros or Ariadne, something which defeats the purpose of using such a large system in the first place. Such things really do work better with a OO by design language such as Java or ASP.Net (I assume, don't know
My guess is that PHP needs a better OO design (and no, PHP5 is not it, yet) and better seperation of logic and presentation for larger systems.
But for smaller stuff, well it's hard to beat in terms of price and speed.
is the prime enterprise use example (although they still use legacy, prepritary web programming based on C, all their new developments are run on PHP and BSD, correct me if i'm wrong)
I worked in a small shop, the web app isn't mission critical stuff like banking, but it wasn't "brainless dump data from Mysql". I was lucky that my boss was totally not picky about languages, as long as it gets the job done. But if I have anyone I work with that doubts the power and simplicity of PHP, Yahoo would be my example.
And so far, developing on the so called LAMP platform, I love PHP and would use it for any and all web development. It can be used as a quick hack (an argument always used against PHP btw, that it's only good for a quick hack and not for professional use), OR you can code it like a pro with objects et al. I was not impressed by Mysql however, it is by no means stable (this is v 4.0.13), but that's another topic.
My sig is my personal pet project using PHP
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I know that you're somewhat joking, but I would have liked the market share questions from InterAKT to have included not just .NET, J2EE, or ColdFusion, but have also included other languages like Perl and Python (although Python is indeed the base language for Zope). There are still a very large amount of websites built in Perl these days, with Slashdot being one of the most famous. Zend's survey does a bit more to explore the languages that programmers "are familiar with," but does little to see how the competition for PHP is doing.
PHP's great to use for me because it's simple, powerful, and readily available in cheap hosting environments. If Zope, ColdFusion, or J2EE had more availability or less cost, then I would try those as well, but there's something to be said for being able to sign up for a $9/month account and downloading Apache, PHP, and MySQL all without paying for anything other than bandwidth costs. You still can't really compare PHP to the enterprise level of .NET or JSP at this point though, since many features like persistent objects in shared memory really can't be done well in PHP, and I haven't heard anything else about PHP 5 other than further enhancements to the objects and reference systems. PHP-Accelerator gives a great boost to the speed, but I'd really like to see native compilation built into the distribution rather than downloaded separatedly.
All in all though, PHP's a great language for quick development of small to medium sized websites. As the old caveat reads though, use the right tool for the job.
Yeah..
To write clean, well structured PHP, you really need to do some good design, use OOP, seperate content/formatting/logic/etc, and basically at that point, you're left with a half-ass OOP implementation, annoying pass by value, messy syntax, no exception handling, etc.
PHP was meant for making relatively minor webpage hacks, and it shows. This still remains PHP's strong point; building enterprise applications (that are designed well) does NOT.
Here's my list of bitches about PHP:
* No class attributes, only instance attributes
* No namespaces (and they were dropped from PHP 5). include()/require()'ing a file just dumps its namespace into the big happy global namespace, and it's a freaking nightmare.
* OOP sucks. You have to litter &'s everywhere to get references, and lots of other problems that I'll refrain from typing out. Ok here's one -- how do you pass an instance method for use as a callback? Something like array($object, "method_name_in_a_string"). Good god.
* No exception handling. Want to "handle" an error? Toss a @ in front of it, then you'll never see it. How helpful.
* Type handling is a nightmare, sure, they make it real easy for the newbies to use numbers-in-strings as numbers, but when you're not a newbie, you begin to run into issues where it's expecting you to be stupid and as a result ends up being stupid itself, and causing you to write disgusting checks just to make sure things are sane.
And that's the root of the whole issue, I think. Things that bend over backwards to cater to newbies end up doing a shitty job for people who have a clue.
Also, if anyone knows of any projects (with source available) written in PHP that are designed well, I would be interested to hear of them. I looked at a tiny bit of PHPMyAdmin's code just for kicks and was horrified. But that's not a valid judgement by any means. Again, I'm just interested to see if there are any out there (and have a look at them).
And a last thing, I might be biased by knowing Python (but I knew PHP first!). Python tends to flow very naturally for me, and even big complex things just end up being big and complex, instead of big and complex and A COMPLETE FREAKING NIGHTMARE like big things in PHP tend to wind up (for me).
Go Python! Death to PHP!
You're absolutely crazy if you want to use PHP for banking and insurance apps.
.NET or J2EE. They're clunky, .NET is expensive, J2EE is slow, but they're both leaps and bounds ahead of PHP.
It's security record is horrible.
It's security model is a joke.
It's object model is worthless compared to real OOP languages.
It completely lacks exception handling, which makes rolling back partial transactions (etc) impossible in banking scenarios.
It's developers regularly break POLA on minor version increments.
It's database support is mediocre at best: third party classes are currently the best (but not only) DB interface PHP has.
Stick with
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Use Vobbo for Video Blogs
I used to think highly of PHP when I was using it for small tasks (creating a blog page and a half ass forum) but man oh man does it suck for doing big projects. In the enterprise marked, there really only one player I'd look to and that is Java. Everything else is really irrelevant. Yes Java has a steep learning curve but once you get ahead of the curve you are never going back to whatever you were using. Java + Eclipse is a deadly combination.
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
IMHO the good parts about PHP are also the bad parts. ie, * you don't have to say what type a variable is, but that means you can't specify a type of parameter to a function. * you don't have to specify scope, but then you can't protect functions that should be private etc.
I looked at a lot of Java code for ideas on what I could do with PHP to clean it up . The main things that I did were: set up a 3 or 4 tier architecture.
- database abstraction layer
- business layer
- presentation layer (preferably using templates)
(I modeled a lot of this on Enhydra - www.enhydra.org)never use globals. Wrap up the HTTP_GET_VARS, HTTP_POST_VARS etc in a class (ie Request). Create classes to wrap the server vars and whatever else.
Use classes for everything. This gives you a reasonable amount of namespace control.
Never access variables directly in classes. Create accessor methods for them.
I think that if you are feeling the need to structure your PHP, you will probably need to move towards Java or some other more structured language. It can definitely be more challenging to write, but as your applications get bigger, the compiler-enforced type checking, programatticaly enforced/supported interfaces etc will save you a lot of time in the long run.