Open Source and the Magic LAMP

Right now there’s nothing hotter than PHP5+. It seems like there are a lot of calls out there for LAMP / PHP developers to help convert monster web applications written in PHP4 spaghetti code, develop Drupal or WordPress sites, build up a site with one of the many frameworks available or just maintain existing sites.

Why now? And by now I mean in the last 2 years.

PHP5 was released in 2004 becoming the only stable version under development in 2008.  It has a full object oriented language model. The PHP Data Objects (PDO) extension was added to provide a lightweight interface for accessing databases.

PHP4 was a very popular, easy to use, open source front end language.  I remember phpwebsite, ez-Publish, gallery, phpBB among others making use of the easily hosted, easy to template solution back in the late 90’s early 2000’s.  I quickly adopted it for datadriven dynamic websites because I didn’t want to deal with ASP or the hassle of Tomcat / Java / JSP.  I was not alone.

The problem was the simple dynamic sites that were so easy to build wound up scaling out into monster procedural messes. It takes a team of top notch Software Architects to refactor and redesign most of these sites.  Although sometimes Senior PHP developers are hired to do this.  In my opinion, from what I’ve seen, its better to toss out and re-design then to build a house on a rotten foundation.

FOSS / OSS has become popular with businesses during the last six years or so. The LAMP stack CMSes like Drupal and Joomla (which I actually consider children of the older PHP4 CMSes now since converted to PHP5), have really taken off.  Why rebuild the wheel when you can get the car for free?  It’s at this point PHP developers are being hired to write plugins and mods, re-skin and re-design these types of applications.

Another hot area of PHP5 usage right now is in the framework department.  PHP is scripting language that has a lot of useful functions that make adding dynamic content to web pages easier.  What PHP is not (and something like Rails is) is a framework. In software terms, frameworks are generally tools and pre-built objects that help you create a solution faster by not reinventing the wheel.  So if you don’t exactly find a FOSS / OSS app out there to your liking, or maybe you do but need to tweak the HECK out of it, you probably want to take a look at some of these PHP frameworks:

http://framework.zend.com/ – zend framework

http://cakephp.org/ – cakephp framework

http://phpsx.org/ – psx framework

http://pear.php.net/ – PEAR – PHP Extension and Application Repository – not really a framework, but will make life easier.

Along with PHP5 development is a dire need for mySQL development and administration.  I’ll talk a little bit about how they go hand in hand in my next post.