Why is PHP Code Considered Hard to Maintain?

November 9th, 2006

Tobias Schlitt describes Tim Bray’s talk at the International PHP Conference. (PDF slides) Tim compares PHP, Java, and Rails along several dimensions. One of those dimensions is maintainability. Tim ranks PHP as least maintainable, Rails in the middle, and Java as most maintainable.
This is not a surprising ranking. [...]

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PHP as a Deployment Platform

November 4th, 2006

PHP has been incredibly successful as a deployment platform for web applications. The WordPress blog brags that the WordPress 2.0 series has been downloaded 1.2 million times.
However, PHP as a platform is far from homogenous. With many different versions installed and the vast configurability of php.ini, there can be a great [...]

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Faster Page Loading

October 31st, 2006

Google engineer Aaron Hopkins wrote a good article on page loading times (via Harry). He talks about the impact of AJAX on page load times, focusing on connection limits, latency and the large number of external objects on your typical AJAX page. He offers a variety of tips on improving page [...]

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The Legality of Republishing RSS Feeds

July 20th, 2006

Tobias Schlitt “freaked out” today about PHP Freak’s republishing of his blog feed. He publicly withdraws his implicit permission for PHP Freaks to republish content from his feeds.
This is an interesting area of law. Eric Goldman has an rundown of the issues.
In my mind, there’s no question that a blogger grants an implied [...]

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un-PEAR-ing

July 5th, 2006

Astonishing. I’m quite surprised. I thought PHPUnit was fairly well integrated into PEAR (pear run-tests). I’m not sure if this is a fork, or if PEAR will continue to use PHPUnit as an external dependency?
I’ve never been a PEAR fan. My experiences being peripherally involved with the XML_HTMLSax package weren’t [...]

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Dependency Injection in PHP

June 26th, 2006

The June issue of PHP Architect is out. My column this month is on dependency injection, a topic which I’ve been warming up to lately.
First there was CORBA. Then insane complexity of CORBA was supplanted by the intolerable complexity of EJB. Influenced by an agile mindset and the power of Unit testing, [...]

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Programming Language Trends via Google

May 10th, 2006

There is a new google toy as of today: Google Trends. So of course, I wanted to see how PHP is faring on the trendy landscape. Here is a comparison of PHP, Java, C#, and Perl:

PHP Java C# Perl

PHP seems to be holding steady, or slightly declining. [...]

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PHP Games

April 6th, 2006

Earlier this morning, I ran across the Heroes of might and magic online mini-game (via digg). The game is written in PHP and uses the prototype and scriptaculous java script libraries. The interface is very drag and drop oriented and it uses Ajax to update game status. The graphics are very good. [...]

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php|architect Test Pattern

March 21st, 2006

The March issue of php|architect came out yesterday. I’m excited to see this issue finally out. I’ve taken over writing the monthly Test Pattern column from Marcus Baker and this issue contains my first column.
Writing doesn’t come easy to me. Writing this blog for the past two years has helped me improve. [...]

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James Gosling on PHP

March 11th, 2006

James Gosling, the “father of Java,” recently commented on PHP:

“PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems,” he continued, “but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance [...]

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