Putt's law:

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand. -- Archibald Putt

Recently Microsoft released its opcode caching solution for PHP on Windows. On techPortal we've published a benchmark. In this article, I want to look at things from a manager's perspective.

As PHP extends its reach further into corporate networks, IT managers have yet another technology that they have to understand so that they can properly deploy. In many situations, PHP code is being developed that - running on its own - creates a bad user experience because of the nature of the language. Because each PHP script has to integrate and compile all of the files with code in them before the results can be output, the more complex systems get, the longer it can take for scripts to respond to their client. Much of this delay, and the user unhappiness that always accompanies it, can be mitigated with the proper opcode caching solution.

Gone are the days when a development team had clear cut definition of what their development and production 'platform' is. Today the term platform includes not only the choice of language (i.e. PHP) but also the persistent data storage, the operating system and increasingly, the selected cloud infrastructure as well. All of these factors combine together to become your platform.

"The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one."
-- Mark Twain

One day recently, I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, The Harvard Business Ideacast and the topic was the recent events of the recession. In talking about banks, the guest speaker said "We believe these entities are too big to fail, but are too complex to manage". That statement hit me like a brick. I've seen several projects go off the rails and looking back at the ones I was involved in, the projects were too complex to manage.

The children's Bible song starts off with the line "Oh be careful little eyes what you see". Regardless of whether you agree with the religious doctrine behind the song, the advice from the first line is, none-the-less, applicable to the PHP community these days.

The web has made it easy for anyone to become an instant pundit, regardless of their background. The tools exist so that anyone can quickly and easily publish anything and call it a fact. Nowhere is this problem more visible than in the software development community at large and the PHP community in specific.

Sometime around the early 90's I started noticing that major companies like Microsoft and Oracle started adding provisions to the EULA's stating that the licenses forbade users from publishing benchmarks about the product. Evil Big Brother implications aside, I now am beginning to at least see why they think it is a good idea.

The fact of the matter is benchmarking today's web based computer software is almost impossible. In past years, the software was easier to isolate and the number of variables could be controlled so that a useful metric could be produced for buyers to be able to compare two similar products. Today however, when software is increasingly being deployed on the web, there are too many moving parts that have to be taken into consideration. In any modern web application web servers, database servers, third party APIs and the network all have to be factored in when benchmarking an application. Any one of these not functioning correctly could cause your benchmarks to report false data.

Ray Kurzweil, in his book "The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology" talks about the increasing pace of change in technology. Anyone who is a manager in an IT department doesn't need Mr. Kurzweil to explain this to them. IT managers live with the reality that they must not only keep up with new technologies that affect their departments but keep up with changes within the technologies they currently use. To bring it home, managers of PHP development teams have to keep up with the changes that happened in PHP 5.3 recently as well as new services from Amazon and Google while trying to fit the forward looking things like Google Wave and PubSubHubBub in there as well. With all of this information being thrown at managers these days, how are you supposed to keep up?

The simple answer is: let others do it for you. There are two ways to do that.

In their recently released report "Users' Choice: Scripting Language Ratings", Evans Data Corporation (no relation to the author of this article) gave PHP the highest overall ranking of the languages they included in their survey.

The full EDC report can be downloaded here (requires free registration).

Talking with 500 developers who actively use scripting languages, EDC ranked the languages on the following criteria. For each category, we've listed how PHP fared:

Part of the mandate for the PHP Center for Expertise inside of Ibuildings is an ongoing series of Business Process Re-Engineering projects. The first of these projects, "Estimating Best Practices", was recently completed and released. It contains the collected best practices from estimators inside Ibuildings, as well as input from external experts and published works.

Our estimating team spent two months thinking and discussing how software companies create estimates; we discussed what works and what doesn't. While the final document itself, along with the accompanying workbook, are available internally only, some of what was learned about the meta process of estimating may be interesting to others. Here are four Best Practices that came out of the process that we want to share with everyone.

PHP is at an inflection point. We are at a once in a lifetime place where several factors are coming together to help boost the profile of PHP up and above the "scripting language" label and into a serious tool for enterprise development.

Many developers inside the PHP community have looked at PHP as serious development tool for years. Major companies like Digg, Expedia, Yahoo and facebook are trotted out during every discussion of PHP to prove what a useful tool PHP is. However, companies like Ladbrokes, Channel Five, Fiat, Panasonic, and the BBC, all use PHP as not only their backend glue language but for serious, enterprise level, transactional workflow systems. In a growing number of large development shops, PHP has gone from "why" to "why not".

Amsterdam is calling, the Dutch PHP Conference 2009 Call for Papers is now open!

Everyone here at Ibuildings is excited about the Dutch PHP Conference 2009. We've already started work on some of the exciting things we've got planned for this year. We want to encourage you to mark June 11-13 on your calendar and plan on attending.