As a fun fact I got this little red elephant from the Zend foundation :)
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| The little Zen php elephant |
The talk reminded me of some of my old php days when everything was procedural code as opposed to Object Oriented.
But it also triggered some thoughts about php as a valuable and inexpensive tool used in projects. Here are a few of them:
1. php is now Object Oriented
That is a big step forward in code re-usability and organic growth. A programming language that has been historically procedural turned OOP over the last 5 years and joined the league of the other big boys in OOP. Here at Witty Mobile Apps we are strong believers in objects and code re-utilization as it allows for faster, organic growth of new features.
2. php has fairly strong frameworks
Zend is one of them. But you also have Symfony, CodeIgniter, Phalcon and Laravel (and many others). These frameworks are great productivity tools as they usually implement loosely coupled components, implement MVC, support different layouts, provide a multitude of templates and support many different database systems.
3. php is free
As a small or medium size business you won't have to pay for virtually any of these productivity tools. The tools are reliable enough and scalable enough to write and maintain enterprise level code. The FreeBSD and Apache licenses help out as well as they assure tight knit compatibility with other free resources such as *nix based web servers and.
4. there is a fairly large and friendly php developers community
php was largely not used 10-15 years ago. Over the last decade it grew a lot in popularity though due to its open source nature and the numerous available frameworks. Every php workshop we attend we see more and more competent developers: they are open minded, collaborative and relatively friendly compared to other niche software development communities.
The online php support resources are great as well.
5. FreeBSD and Linux OSes are open source
The open source nature of these Operating Systems help a great deal when working on debugging code including php code. Actually having access to the sources and being able to fix things "from inside" makes a big difference because you do not depend on XYZ vendor with a closed system and a zealous Accounts Receivable Department.
And as a side note: here at Witty Mobiles we use php on a daily basis in all sorts of web applications but we have lately found in niche in writing web services in php to hookup MySQL databases to different kinds of mobile front ends. php works fast are reliable.
Due to all these reasons, I envision php to grow up even more during the upcoming years.
Make it a great day!
Adrian Corbuleanu
Miami Beach, FL
http://wittywebnow.com
