PHP5 Co-Creator Interview

mandozcode writes "I came across an interesting interview with PHP co-creator Zeev Suraski at Open Enterprise Trends on the latest upgrades for PHP5's First Release Candidate (just released a week or so ago). Sounds like lots of improvements to help make it in the enterprise, including better bundled support for SQLlite and XML. Also encouraging, looks like Zend is getting more millions in VC investment."

Comments

Php in the enterprise? Scary thought.

[neiras]

Since its inception, PHP has gone from a simple website templating language and form processing tool, to a semi-OO scripting language hacked onto a bunch of C extensions, and now they expect to become a fully OO, enterprise-ready language?

Scary.

To write web applications properly and efficiently, you need a framework to support you. You do NOT want to be reinventing the wheel. Have you noticed the massive proliferation of database abstraction layers, incompatible form processing libraries, etc. etc. all written in PHP for PHP developers? Libraries of code written in a templating language! Eep. Every reasonably experienced PHP developer has probably tried to create an application framework at some point - if people keep seeing the need for one, it's a good bet PHP needs to supply one. No, PEAR is not an application development framework.

And what is it with all those PHP developers who seem to think a "class" is another term for "static function library"? The concept of using object types is foreign to thse people - they'd rather make huge monster arrays.

Just because the "I Can Use A Database So I Must Be A Web Developer" crowd thinks every web app could and should be written in PHP does NOT mean that that's actually the case.

PHP downright _encourages_ beginners to embed application-logic in HTML pages. I've been through a rewrite of an absolutely MASSIVE PHP site, and it was a year-long affair for five developers. The old site had become impossible to maintain. Talk about a waste of resources.

When PHP adopts a *standard* way of separating content logic from application logic, and enforces that split (kind of the way JSP pages work with servlets), then _maybe_ there will be some hope for it in the enterprise. Until then, Java will continue to dominate. I find it funny that Java interaction is such a high priority for PHP - if Java's installed on a company's hardware, a developer's natural reaction would be to use Java, not write something in some other language.

Re:Php in the enterprise? Scary thought.

[wan-fu]

I do agree that all too often applications are rammed into PHP without too much forethought; however, I think PHP is already going in the right direction for enterprise level development. The object orientedness of the language is much improved since PHP3. They have the Smarty template engine which does a fairly good job of separating presentation from application. People should be encouraged to use it and I think as PHP apps get bigger, people will begin to realize the advantage to separating design logic from application logic. Most importantly, there are a variety of third-party developers creating frameworks such as the Horde framework or Blueshoes framework (I no affiliation with either). And that's great that there are such frameworks. It's not the job of the language developer to create the framework imho (e.g. CPAN does a great job supplementing Perl)