PHPDeveloper.org

Jeff Atwood's Blog: PHP Sucks, But It Doesn't Matter

Thu, 22 May 2008 07:57:12 -0500

There's an interesting post Jeff Atwood has made to his blog about PHP - its lack of standards, the way the language is structured and why none of that matters when it comes to its popularity.

PHP isn't so much a language as a random collection of arbitrary stuff, a virtual explosion at the keyword and function factory.

He includes links to several other articles that follow the "PHP sucks" train of thought too, but he notes that none of that really matters - its the popularity of PHP, its use in major corporate and social networking applications that is seeming to help drive it even more for developers to pick up and learn as a first web language.

Why fight it? I say learn to embrace it. Join with me, won't you, in celebrating the next fifty years of glorious PHP code driving the internet. Just don't forget to call the maintain_my_will_to_live() PHP function every so often!

Responses from the community:

Stas on the PHP 10.0 blog

Developer Tutorials Blog: Five reasons you should be using PHP

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 08:48:00 -0600

The Developer Tutorials blog has posted their five reasons why they think you should be including PHP in your development.

Sure, it isn't perfect. It has its problems; from professionalism to consistency and even versioning. Still, it's a fantastic language for web development; it's efficient, scalable and, when used appropriately, effective. Read on for five reasons you should be using PHP for web development.

They break it up into:

Deployment
Functionality
Infrastructure
Speed
Resources

Stuart Herbert's Blog: Arguments From The Boardroom, Not The Bedroom

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 09:32:00 -0500

Stuart Herbert looks today at some of the reasoning behind the push to move developers out to PHP5 - specifically that there's a lack of commercial-related discussion about what issues there might be.

What I'm not seeing are the commercial arguments to move to PHP 5 (/me points an accusing finger at the folks from Zend, with whom this discussion has been had before). Businesses will only make the move when there is something to gain from the effort, when the rewards of switching are more than the cost of doing nothing. So let's see if we can find some reasons to chivvy them along!

He breaks the rest of the post into sections:

Why Move To PHP 5?
What's The Cost Of Staying On PHP 4?
What Are The Barriers To Moving To PHP 5?
How Do I Cover My Costs Of Upgrading?
What Are The Alternatives To PHP 5?
Making The Move

Nick Halstead's Blog: 10 Reasons why PHP is still very much alive

Fri, 11 May 2007 14:22:00 -0500

On his blog today, Nick Halstead has posted what he considers the top ten reasons that PHP as a language is still around:

I have recently come across quite a few articles about the current state of PHP. The current situation does seem, on one hand, quite bleak. [...] We need to first educate all PHP programmers that writing in PHP 4 is only going to hold back the language. And that secondly there is a whole world of new features and ways of doing things that are simpler, slicker and more up to date than ever before. I include here a non-definitive top 10 things that a PHP programmer should know about.

A few of the items included in his list involve:

classes and their use in PHP5 applications
the flexibility allowed with multiple database support
the multitude of frameworks currently offered
debuggers and profilers

...and, my personal favorite, all of the support that the PHP community has. There's plenty of tutorials, forums, websites, user groups - and of course, the manual - that can help out with just about any developer's question.

The Stubbles Blog: Why we develop Stubbles

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 08:29:00 -0500

On the Stubbles blog, there's a new post that answers a question they'd mentioned in a previous post about why they develop the Stubbles framework.

In an earlier entry I promised that we will explain why we develop Stubbles. Well, there is a short version of it and a long version.

Short version: for us.
Read on for the long version.

He (Franke Kleine) lists out the reasons in his long version, including:

Release cycles and maintenance requirements
Why "use your force to improve another framework" is not a valid point
Do we really reinvent the wheel?
More company influence
To open source or to not open source

...each with their own justification. Even if some of them are a little weak ("other people started frameworks, why can't we?"), most are good reasons for them to create their own in-house framework that just happens to be released to the rest of the community. Their effort wasn't to create something for the greater good, but to make something that they (and anyone else that might find it useful) could use.

PHPKitchen: Advantages of using the PEAR class naming convention

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 07:51:00 -0500

Keeping with convention - well, naming convention - is a good thing sometimes. Demian Turner thinks so and talks about one of many reasons he sees to follow a standard set in place for a while now - the PEAR naming standard.

By far the most convincing reason to use the file naming convention, which means that a class located in your include path like Foo/Bar/Baz.php is called Foo_Bar_Baz, is the ability to take advantage of PHP 5's __autoload magic method.

The __autoload functionality in PHP 5 is definitely one of the most handy, elegant single lines of code out there and I'd definitely vote for anything that will make working with it even easier. Demian also includes a few lines of example code to show the interaction between the function and the files with the naming convention.