Marco Tablini has a long blog entry about friction between the commercial activities of Zend and the PHP open source community. I am not even going to try to tally the balance sheet for Zend’s Karma. I do have one point (or rather several questions) to add to Marco’s “evil” Zend bullet list:
Why is APC a PECL package and not a part of the standard PHP distribution? If PHP the open source project were more independent from Zend the commercial entity, would PHP have a bundled opcode cache? Is there any reason other than Zend’s commercial activities for PHP the open source project NOT to include an opcode cache? Educate me.
It does look like Zend is making a marketing push. A press release on their site says that they have hired a new vice president of marketing, Pamela Roussos. If you read her bio, she looks like a good catch for Zend with experience with enterprise development tools vendors. It also seems like Pamela has decided to showcase Andi and Zeev as part of the marketing effort. I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t trying to build up them, and thus their rates for consulting purposes. Although, as Marco suggests, they may just be trying to bolster their position as “the company behind PHP.” We may see more changes at Zend tied to this new funding/marketing push.
Marco writes:
Despite its popularity and power, PHP still generates some of the lowest-paying jobs in the IT industry, and thats undeserved.
This is the curse of PHP’s shallow learning curve and widespread use and availability. Wages are set by supply and demand. The supply is great. Barrier to entry are low.
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If I might add one minor comment… the supply of good talent is not great at all–it is simply drowned out by the incredible amount of mediocrity out there, which, in the past has been fueled at least in part by poor literature and a seemingly low barrier of entry (sure, anyone can pick up PHP in a day, but how many people out there can write *good*, solid PHP?). Moving to the enterprise, both with serious technical reference resources and a certification program, is bound to improve the overall level of knowledge and raise the bar, both in quality and price.
I’m not in favor of adding APC (or other PECL extensions) to the basic PHP build. In my eyes the other way round is the right one. The current PHP dictributions are overcrowded with extensions. Moving all those (not really commonly used) extensions into PECL would be a way to slim the PHP main package and to have extensions installed on demand.
right on Toby
besides, adding APC to the standard extensions of PHP will make Zend Optimizer/Accelerator the *alternative* PHP cache and the APC will become the *standard* PHP cache
A couple of thoughts:
1. As someone who makes a living building web based applications using mostly PHP, I find that “the curse of PHP’s shallow learning curve and widespread use and availability” cuts both ways. I often steal work from both in-house and contract Java and .NET developers because of PHP’s price/performance lets me keep my rates at their level and undercut them.
2. Maybe we should start promoting PHP.E or PHPEE for PHP Enterprise! Both Java and .NET are more about the marketing hype their owners have done to sell their software than reality. We come up with a logo, throw up one of those industry group websites (phpee.org is available), and set some standards for what PHP Enterprise best practices are (The WACT site has a lot of it already). PHP needs a group that is little Gang of Four and a splash of Sun/Microsoft marketing hype. One who’s focus is “here are some right ways Mr. Enterprise,” not “my way is better than your way.”
3. I’m not sure what Toby is smoking, but pass it to me and ask him this: if APC was standard, who would choose turn it off?
That’s the point. There’s no reason not to have opcode caching. How can you turn down a 1x-100x performance increase??? It’s the one thing that keeps PHP’s performance behind the other commercial alternatives, and it’s currently the *only* major player that doesn’t have a form of byte-code caching.
Yes… I do think Zend is “evil”. They put their financial interests two-fold above PHP and the community – They bought out the developer of Turck MMCache, which was an open source alternative to Zend’s Accelerator – as well as out-performed it! So Zend gets a great programmer… and get rid of the competition for their commercial products. Absolute BS, in my mind.
I’m hopeful for APC. I have word from the developer that we can hopefully expect a new release that’s PHP5 compatible in the next 3-4 weeks. Currently there is no PHP5 compatible opcode cache app apart from Zend Accelerator.
Zend better be watching themselves. They can’t let their financial interests get in the way of what’s best for PHP. If they start becoming too commercial, they aren’t going to have the support in the future that they have right now, regardless of how much they want to. They can’t afford to lose the support of all the cheap hosting sites out there, new developers, etc…. because as much as they want to be a player in corporate America, they that’s going to be a tough (even impossible, with the current model) road to tread, and it’s going to take a lot of time regardless.
In short, yes I’m interested in APC being actively developed as a part of core PHP. Opcode caching support as a core in any language compiled to byte-code shouldn’t even be in question in today’s market.
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