Thoughts on PHP
I left Seattle, for Japan, on September 4, 2003. Almost 12 years year, my wife and I returned, back in August. A lot has changed here in those years, but it’s been a pretty comfortable process. Not long after I got here, I jumped into a project, helping an old friend, with a legacy web application that was part .NET (.aspx), part PHP 5, and part WordPress. It was quite a challenge. She’d worked with several developers, and the project had stalled out. I helped her get the project back on track, fixed some issues, documented all of the files and functions in the code, and helped her interview and hire a competent development team.
I spend so much time writing code, so it was valuable to work on reading and figuring out legacy code. I’ve done some work with .NET and PHP sites, but they’re not really my specialty. Working with Ruby is a joy, but there are a couple things I do like about PHP:
- It’s fairly ubiquitous; you can write the same code and deploy it on both Linux and Windows servers.
- You can easily add a little PHP to a site, and add dynamic features.
However, I think that because it’s so easy to sprinkle PHP into your code, it’s easy to end up with a mess, like my friend’s site. Fortunately, it looks like PHP offers some great tools for incorporating TDD into projects. For example:
I’m back to working on my own projects and development. But it was nice to get a little exposure to PHP, and to joining a more mature project. It might be intersting to compare PHP frameworks, like Codeigniter or Laravel to Rails at some point. For now, I am back to working on improving my Rails projects, and looking for a gig here in Seattle. 
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