I hear a lot of talk about the use of PHP in the Enterprise, recently there was even a white paper circulated extolling the virtues of PHP and attempting to make the case that PHP should be the language of choice for Enterprise development. Although the paper does bring up some interesting points such as the large number of extensions and the fact that there are a number of bridges for PHP to load native code written in Java and other languages, taking away from these strengths was that there is way too much emphasis placed on how many websites run PHP. Although it is hard to argue with the fact that PHP is greatly suited to web development, that in no way translates into suitability for Enterprise development. No offense to the language, but
I find it perfectly understandable that PHP is not often considered a language suitable for Enterprise development.
PHP developers have a love-hate relationship with Java. Many PHP'ers are quick to point out that "
PHP is not Java" and yet when one considers some of the most recent waves in PHP interest, they are frequently things that have been around in the Java world for years and are just now being introduced into PHP. A couple of recent examples are the sudden surge in
PHPUnit and
phpUnderControl. The latter isn't even a fully native PHP solution but en extension of the venerable Cruise Control continuous integration suite. That being said, I use both of those extensively and they form a crucial part of my software development process. Unfortunately, I feel that the adoption of these technologies has started to plateau as the initial wave of blog posts and general buzz have died down. Many PHPers feel that it's just too much effort for what it's worth. This is the key to the whole debate in my opinion. PHP developers put everything behind speed when it comes to development, in fact I often see bad code decisions being made for the benefits of a few CPU cycles. Perhaps it's because the speed of PHP is the primary strength that developers point to when comparing it to other languages that they focus on that feature. Honestly,
PHP should be the fastest language on the web, after all it's all it's done for the last decade.
Here's what you should take away from this post:
1) Using PHP does not
make you cooler. It should mean that you have chosen the right tool for the job. There is a reason why Zend Studio (from Zend,
The PHP Company) is written in Java and not PHP-GTK. Why be just a PHP developer when you can be a programmer with many tools at your disposal.
2) If you want to improve the way PHP is considered in terms of The Enterprise, make your code look like it was written for the Enterprise. Stop considering your software to be something that you will write and throw away. Write it like it's something you will have to maintain for a decade and some day you just might get to.
