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PHP At 20: From Pet Project To Powerhouse

Posted by timothy on from the son-have-you-considered-a-career? dept.

snydeq writes: Ben Ramsey provides a look at the rise of PHP, the one-time 'silly little project' that has transformed into a Web powerhouse, thanks to flexibility, pragmatism, and a vibrant community of Web devs. "Those early days speak volumes about PHP's impact on Web development. Back then, our options were limited when it came to server-side processing for Web apps. PHP stepped in to fill our need for a tool that would enable us to do dynamic things on the Web. That practical flexibility captured our imaginations, and PHP has since grown up with the Web. Now powering more than 80 percent of the Web, PHP has matured into a scripting language that is especially suited to solve the Web problem. Its unique pedigree tells a story of pragmatism over theory and problem solving over purity."

3 of 281 comments (clear)

  1. Why PHP Won by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hello world in PHP:

    Hello world!

    No Bullshit Boilerplate (TM), no needing 5KLoC of code and configuration, no application server to babysit 24/7, no need for catalina+tomcat+jakarta+jre+struts+hibernate+Xmxwtfbbq16GB, just load one module and every single customer sharing the server can use it... No need to understand the CGI protocol, no need to understand the HTTP protocol, no need to understand HTML even.

  2. Re:PHP is great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    thin shim between C libraries
    That is a great point. Since the Microsoft fanbois hate Linux, they hate PHP. PHP is basically a way to call C libraries. That is why the library naming conventions in PHP are so inconsistent. It's because PHP is exposing those libraries, with all of their individual quirks, to an easy to use scripting language.

    Where I work, we converted a C-based CGI program that was developed from 1994 until 2009. At peak, I think we had nine C developers working on it. It took us only six months with three PHP developers to write a good PHP replacement that called our C libraries. Now I have two new college grads that are very productive adding features to the web site whereas before, I had expensive C programmers each with more than ten years of experience that took dozens of times longer to complete tasks. PHP has cut our development overhead by probably 80%. Now the three remaining C programmers can work on interesting projects rather than on web pages. PHP has, and this is not an exaggeration, saved my company.

  3. Re: PHP is great by zenbi · · Score: 5, Informative

    Try using it. It's an alias to another function that requires an optional library that ... doesn't implement the function.

    What? HTTP redirects with the header() function have been simple and consistent the entire lifetime of the language. The function is not an alias and does not require an optional library as you claim. I especially like that it exposes the underlying HTTP headers of the protocol instead of wrapping the redirect into some type of hidden Response.Redirect() type function. This "lower level" makes understanding and debugging redirect problems much more obvious.