Posts Tagged ‘business’

Yesterday Twitter announced it has acquired Tweetie, the popular Twitter client for iPhone (and Mac desktops but the move seems to focus on the iPhone app).

Disclaimer: I love Tweetie; dispite it not being free (it will be free from now on), I liked it much better than the free alternatives.

For Twitter, this is a good move. It will finally give them an 'official' client for phones. They also announced a Blackberry app yesterday, and you can easily see that they needed one by looking at their 'Using twitter with your phone' page. It explains how to use Twitter using SMS, something that never really caught on as a main twitter use. With this move, Twitter fills a hole they had in their product offering. It is very similar to what happened in 2008, when they acquired Summize, which is now search.twitter.com.
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I was recently interviewed by Computerworld UK regarding our launch in the UK and the current rise of PHP in the corporate world.

The result is online here.

The 'leading PHP expert' phrase are not my words, but pretty cool.

How do you see PHP pickup in your country? The Nexen stats are one thing, but how businesses are using it is another. Post a comment to let me know how 'PHP' and 'Business' go together in your region.

Unfortunately, Derick Rethans just announced that this year he will do no more PHP lookback. Derick: thanks for the years that you wrote them, and let's hope someone else will take over.

When I look back at 2007, what strikes me most is how strong a foothold PHP has gained in business environments. Sure, overall PHP usage has been steadily growing as always, but PHP is seen more and more in large corporations. Sometimes next to java (a common scenario is a java J2EE backend with a PHP frontend), but sometimes it's just PHP. I have encountered publishing agencies, retailers, manufacturers and even large insurance companies. They are running internal applications on PHP, and although often their external websites are pretty plain, their internal systems are very critical systems, with cashflows that are depending entirely on applications written in PHP.

I think what we see happening here is very similar to what happened to Linux a few years ago. Started as someone's hobby, adopted by enthousiasts, then for a while growing in popularity as an important OS in internet environments, and finally making its way into the enterprise. It has happened to Linux, to Apache (and its spin-off projects), it is now happening to PHP and I predict for 2008 that we will also see MySQL moving more and more into that direction (it's ubiquitous on the internet already, it just needs to take the leap to the enterprise).

Some say that Ruby was a big threat to PHP in 2007 (thanks to the Ruby on Rails framework). I have flirted a bit with Ruby myself, and language-wise, it's much cleaner and consistent. However, selecting a programming language is not just about the language. It's about factors such as community support, learning curve, installed base, companies supporting it and many more factors, and I think PHP has proven to be pretty strong in that area.

A fact supporting the statement that PHP has become 'serious business' in 2007 is the availability and adoption of 'enterprise' tools. Zend, for example, has always catered to the developer with tools such as their Zend Studio IDE and projects such as Zend Framework, but now they also have tools that the managers of those developers will like, such as Zend Core and Zend Platform; tools focusing on things like productivity, scalability, reliability and several other business-friendly *ity words. This is in line with other components of the LAMP stack: there's already 'Enterprise Linux' and 'Enterprise MySQL'. Zend positions Zend Platform as 'Enterprise PHP' (they're just not calling it that yet ). It's natural for a company like Zend to move into this direction. I hope that more PHP companies will follow suit and release professional products around PHP, there's definitely a market for tools.

I think however that still the biggest driving force behind PHP aren't the companies, but the community. It's the community that leads; businesses just follow. With many conferences in 2007, it's clear that there's a big PHP community. The community is not just the 'celebrities' that write the language or that speak at conferences, it's everybody working with PHP. I've met many people from the community this year, and hope to meet even more next year.

It's great to be a part of this community!

P.S. It would also be nice to have another PHP Throwdown competition next year, and it would be nice if someone would actually win this time (hi Elizabeth! ).

Sometimes recruiting efforts yield very nice results.

As of this week, Mikko Koppanen works in our Ibuildings UK team. Mikko is known from his Imagick extension, a wrapper to use ImageMagick in PHP.

The nice thing about this is that now we finally have someone on board who knows how to write PHP extensions.

A few weeks ago, Stefan Koopmanschap joined our Dutch team. Stefan is, among other things, in the board of the Dutch PHP User Group, and maintains the Dutch Symfony site.

With these 2 additions to our team, our PHP army is growing steadily, allowing us to continuously improve our support to companies in the UK and The Netherlands that are taking PHP seriously. PHP is rapidly moving into the realm of big corporations, and this means that there's a lot of demand for PHP professionals.

In the past weeks, we've been in contact with several major Dutch websites that are planning to move from java or .net to PHP, which is a very good sign.

Also, we've started working with several Computer Science institutes to add PHP to their curriculum. Most of them are already doing things with PHP, but often this is limited to very basic applications, a CMS, a blog etc. We're now helping them to breed better PHP programmers by teaching proper OO, Design Patterns, MVC, frameworks etc.

Traditionally, these institutes have been Java and .NET oriented, and we hope this will help show more people how PHP is a viable language for serious web applications.

[marketing mode] If you want to join us in our efforts to bring PHP to the business world, we still have openings [/marketing mode]

On june 16th we organized the first Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam. The event was attended by more than 250 people and with speakers such as Cal Evans, Kevlin Henney, Lukas Smith, Derick Rethans and many others, I think it was a great event.

We've decided to make it a yearly event, so mark June 14, 2008 in your agenda for the next instalment.

I did a presentation on business frameworks (and ATK in particular) at the conference, the slides of which can be found on slideshare.

The DPC was not the only new conference, last monday I visited the first Zend UK PHP for Business Seminar organized by the London office of Zend. This conference was targeted at 'business people', and featured speakers such as Zeev Suraski, Harold Goldberg (Zend's new CEO), David Boloker (IBM) and Clint Oram (SugarCRM).

I had the honor of presenting a talk on 'enterprise PHP development' on the seminar. Since it was targeted at business people, I explained the development process of PHP applications using metaphors. What may be obvious for most of us, isn't so obvious for a lot of people and companies, so I found it important to talk about the process surrounding PHP development, and not just plain PHP coding itself.

Below are the slides of this talk:

This is the 7th presentation I did in 3 months time; I'm beginning to get the hang of this.