Professional PHP
an open-source alternative for enterprise development
Thijs Feryn
Felix De Vliegher
19/11/’08, Katho Kortrijk

About us
• Thijs Feryn
• Support manager & senior developer at COMBELL
• PHP developer for about 5 years
• Zend PHP5, cerGfied engineer
• Felix De Vliegher
• Senior developer & sysadmin at COMBELL
• PHP developer for about 7 years
• Zend PHP5, Zend Framework cerGfied engineer
• Co‐founder PHPBelgium
• Contributor to the PHP project

About COMBELL
• Founded in 1999
• 30 FTE and growing
• +25 000 customers
• Premium / Quality hosting segment
• Leading hosting provider in Belgium concerning
hosting & domain names in the SME market
• + 60 000 domain names
• + 20 000 websites
• + 600 servers, owned & managed by
COMBELL
• + 400 resellers

You?
• Experience with programming
• Experience with PHP
• Experience with PHP based applications
• OOP in PHP?
• Professional experience? (read: not katho)

Open source software
• Development methodology
• Source code is available
• Use, change, improve
• Collaborative
• Common licenses: GPL, LGPL, MIT
• Free “as in beer”

LAMP stack
• First used in c't magazine in 1998
• Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP
• Open-source, free software
• Available everywhere Application
• Proven track record PHP
Apache MySQL
Linux

Why PHP?
Easy to learn

Why PHP?
• Flexible in webserver environment
• Platform independent
• Lots of libraries, frameworks
• Huge community
• Code is freely available
• Documentation
• Commercial support
• Short TTM

PHP vs other languages
(let’s say Java?)
• Dynamically typed
• Low entry barrier
• Stateless
• Platform independence (vs .NET)
• Interpreted language
• Extensions and libraries
• Built-in
• Pecl
• Pear

PHP is community friendly

PHP is community friendly
• Lots of PHP conferences / PHP UG’s
• Initiatives to contribute and learn
• Active and friendly support:
• forums
• irc
• twitter

Shiny statistics (sort of)
Yahoo IBM & Oracle Microsoft
PHP 4 goes PHP PHP 5 endorse PHP endorses PHP PHP 6?

PHP Applications

Used by

COMBELL customers using PHP

Support by

PHP in the enterprise
Evolution from a functional approach to enterprise
fundamentals

The fundamentals

Functionality
• Language choice based on features
• Often the first and only concern
• Evolution towards:
• Frameworks
• Testing & debugging

PHP Frameworks
• Eases development
• More structure
• Glue (component) vs full-stack
• DRY
• No maintenance
• Extend or plugin where needed

PHP Frameworks
• Zend Framework
• Component library and framework
• Symfony
• Full stack framework
• eZ Components
• Component library
• Loosely coupled
• Code Igniter
• Fast web application framework

Security
1: Thou shalt
filter input and escape
output

Security
• php.ini settings
• Areas of importance:
• Form processing
• Databases
• Sessions
• Error handling / reporting
• Suhoshin / SAPI filter

Performance
• Micro optimizations?
• No premature optimization!
• Caching
• Opcode caching
• {Page|Database|Module|...} caching
• Database
• Optimized database design
• Indexing strategy
• Writing good SQL

Performance
• Profiling: optimizing code
• Optimalization of PHP as a language

Scalability
• Shared nothing: independent and self-sufficient
• Design patterns - MVC
• Database scaling - sharding
• Development methodologies - agile, scrum
• Version control
• Documentation!

Testing
I pity the fool who
doesn’t write tests!

Testing
• More testing == less debugging!
• Applications should work as expected
• Actually takes less time
• Provides higher quality
• Easier to refactor and change
• Makes confident developers

Testing and coverage

PHP Tools and utilities
• Editors
• Eclipse PDT - http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/
• Zend Studio - http://www.zend.com/studio
• Continuous Integration
• phpUnderControl - http://www.phpunit.de
• Debuggers / Profilers
• Xdebug - http://www.xdebug.org
• Testing tools
• PHPUnit - http://www.phpunit.info
• Selenium - http://selenium-ide.openqa.org/

Certifications
• Zend PHP 5 certification
• Zend Framework Certification
• Why:
• Differentiate yourself when looking for a job
• Get listed in Zend Yellow Pages
• Confirmation of a decent PHP skillset

PHPBelgium user group
• Point of information for PHP
• For developers, education, businesses
• Bi-monthly meetings (with a drink)
• Organizing PHP-related events
• PHP Bug Hunt Day
http://www.phpbelgium.be | http://bughuntday.org

Learn more about PHP
• Books:
• All of php|architect
• Power PHP 5 programming
• Advanced PHP Programming
Magazines:
• php|architect magazine

Learn more about PHP
• Websites:
http://www.phpdeveloper.org
http://devzone.zend.com
http://planet-php.org
• IRC (irc.freenode.net):
#phpc, ##php, #php_bnl
• Training:
PHP|Architect
Ibuildings (http://www.ibuildings.nl)

Applied at COMBELL
• Service oriented architecture
• Highly integrated with hosted solutions
• Using Zend Framework, Symfony
• Development workflow with:
• Subversion
• Unit testing
• Continuous integration (Cruisecontrol)

Others are hiring too
• PHP is becoming big in enterprises
• Valid career choice, not everything needs
to be done with Java or .NET
• PHP Engineers are in high demand!

If our presentation were a book

Thanks!
Any questions?
More info:
felix@combellgroup.com
thijs@combellgroup.com