I've been to some conference lately and next to me was a guy sitting excited about the high traffic system he's building—I asked about the language he is using:
He (playing with his iPad 3): PHP
Me: I thought PHP devs died out for years??
He (angry): PHP is still the most used language for the web and it's fast.
Me: Do you guys still mix front-end and back-end code?
He (still angry): Of course not.
Back home I started googling "PHP" and "PHP frameworks" for the first time since 2003 again. I was surprised: there are many Rails-inspired frameworks like Yii, Zend, Codigniter, etc. And I tried to be objective giving PHP another chance (I haven't an actual use for PHP but I was just bored and wanted to be prepared for better counterattacks next time).
My impressions:
- There seem to be too many frameworks or call them ecosystems, so I couldn't figure out which is the dominating one (Zend?). And I am not sure if they are really interoperable
- Not relevant but awkward: most frameworks websites (except Yii) and in particular the PHP site look like 2003. What disturbed most was the often used claim "no console needed".
- On Freelancer.com, Monster or any other job-related site the quantity of postings for PHP devs were massive—any other web-related fraemwork/language else like Ruby, Python, Django was a small fraction oft that.
After looking at some "modern" PHP code (which strictly follow the MVC patterns now) I still couldn't get warm with PHP. I assume that most PHP devs are long-time PHP devs and I don't understand how PHP can attract people compared to newer concepts.
IMHO the only two PHP frameworks you need to care about are: Symfony2 (think a PHP equivalent to Django or Rails) and Silex (think a PHP equivalent to Sinatra).
I've just spent the weekend porting an old site to Silex and Twig (a PHP equivalent to HAML) and its been a breeze.
Both frameworks come from the same people and have excellent documentation and support (i.e. they are not run by a couple of geeks somewhere who might suddenly stop developing them once they get bored). See: http://symfony.com/elevator-pitches
People honestly still believe PHP is fast? Wow. Even Ruby (1.9, YARV) is as fast as PHP nowadays, and it's one of the slowest mainstream scripting languages you can use right now...
He (playing with his iPad 3): PHP
Me: I thought PHP devs died out for years??
He (angry): PHP is still the most used language for the web and it's fast.
Me: Do you guys still mix front-end and back-end code?
He (still angry): Of course not.
Back home I started googling "PHP" and "PHP frameworks" for the first time since 2003 again. I was surprised: there are many Rails-inspired frameworks like Yii, Zend, Codigniter, etc. And I tried to be objective giving PHP another chance (I haven't an actual use for PHP but I was just bored and wanted to be prepared for better counterattacks next time).
My impressions:
- There seem to be too many frameworks or call them ecosystems, so I couldn't figure out which is the dominating one (Zend?). And I am not sure if they are really interoperable
- Not relevant but awkward: most frameworks websites (except Yii) and in particular the PHP site look like 2003. What disturbed most was the often used claim "no console needed".
- On Freelancer.com, Monster or any other job-related site the quantity of postings for PHP devs were massive—any other web-related fraemwork/language else like Ruby, Python, Django was a small fraction oft that.
After looking at some "modern" PHP code (which strictly follow the MVC patterns now) I still couldn't get warm with PHP. I assume that most PHP devs are long-time PHP devs and I don't understand how PHP can attract people compared to newer concepts.