PHP in the Enterprise
When I started programming PHP professionally in 1999, PHP was just starting its emergence as more than a niche scripting language for hobbyists. That was the time of PHP 4, and the first Zend Engine had made PHP faster and more stable. PHP deployment was also increasing exponentially, but it was still a hard sell to use PHP for large commercial Web sites. This difficulty originated mainly from two sources:
Perl/ColdFusion/other-scripting-language developers who refused to update their understanding of PHP's capabilities from when it was still a nascent language. Java developers who wanted large and complete frameworks, robust object-oriented support, static typing, and other "enterprise" features.
Neither of those arguments holds water any longer. PHP is no longer a glue-language used by small-time enthusiasts; it has become a powerful scripting language whose design makes it ideal for tackling problems in the Web domain.
A programming language needs to meet the following six criteria to be usable in business-critical applications:
The first criterionfast prototypinghas been a strength of PHP since its inception. A critical difference between Web development and shrink-wrapped software development is that in the Web there is almost no cost to shipping a product. In shipped software products, however, even a minor error means that you have burned thousands of CDs with buggy code. Fixing that error involves communicating with all the users that a bug fix exists and then getting them to download and apply the fix. In the Web, when you fix an error, as soon as a user reloads the page, his or her experience is fixed. This allows Web applications to be developed using a highly agile, release-often engineering methodology.
Scripting languages in general are great for agile products because they allow you to quickly develop and test new ideas without having to go through the whole compile, link, test, debug cycle. PHP is particularly good for this because it has such a low learning curve that it is easy to bring new developers on with minimal previous experience.
PHP 5 has fully embraced the rest of these ideas as well. As you will see in this book, PHP's new object model provides robust and standard object-oriented support. PHP is fast and scalable, both through programming strategies you can apply in PHP and because it is simple to reimplement critical portions of business logic in low-level languages. PHP provides a vast number of extensions for interoperating with other servicesfrom database servers to SOAP. Finally, PHP possesses the most critical hallmark of a language: It is easily extensible. If the language does not provide a feature or facility you need, you can add that support.
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