Monday, 14 May 2007

Ten Reasons to Know Why PHP is Still Popular

Nick Halstead provides you with ten reasons to explain how PHP is still alive. He is of the opinion that the current state of PHP is bleak. He says, its bleak because statistics suggests that PHP 5 installation is only 17 per cent and is not showing any sign of increase. He prophesizes that PHP6 would come and a large proportion of servers will still be using PHP4.

Nick says the only route out of this self-fulfillinfg prophecy is education. PHP programmers should learn that writing in PHP4 would only hold back the language and there are many new features and ways of doing things that are simpler and up to date than before.

He gives the following ten points that a programmer should know about:

• Classes: since PHP 5 there are real classes that allow abstraction, reflection and even type hinting. Although not perfect the class model now being used means that every PHP programmer no longer has an excuse not to use them.
• Magic Methods: Ruby is clever with its everything-is-an-object, well PHP with its Magic Methods gives you the power to make your objects do ‘anything’.
• Exception handling: since PHP 5 we now have exception handling.
• Database support: things have moved on a lot from PHP 4 and ‘mysql_fetch_assoc’. The PDO gives a lightweight consistent interface to your database.
• Acceleration support: there are plenty of commercial or non-commercial solutions. Speed increases can be up to 5x. Zend Platform, Zend Optimizer, PHP Accelerator, eAccelerator falls in this category
• Platform support: although this costs money the platform cannot be underestimated for the benefits it brings. Integrated error tracking, performance management, and enterprise scalability. Any good PHP programmer should at least have a development version of this running.
• IDE's: PHP has a selection of decent IDE's to choose from like NuSphere PhpED, Eclipse PHP, Zend Studio and PHPEdit.
• Debuggers/Profilers: most of the above IDE's come with debuggers. But there are others to choose from like Xdebug and DBG.
• Support: PHP has vast amounts of support out there. From sample code, tutorials, testing frameworks, forums, PHP clubs and more.