A presentation on PHP's position in the enterprise, its past & present, how to get ready for developing for enterprise. Inspired by Ivo Jansch's "PHP in the real wolrd" presentation. Presented at SoftExpo 2010, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

1. … to be precise: “PHP in real world”

2.  Introduction
 A look at PHP
 What is Enterprise
 Development Lifecycle
 Enterprise Techniques
 Take-Aways
 Open Discussion

3. Who is here?

5.  How many of us here are:
• Management / Decision makers
• Project Managers
• Developers – PHP
• Developers – Other (.NET/RoR/Python/Java/…)
• Student / Hobbyist

6. Past and Present

10.  Made for the web
 Low learning curve
 Short time-to-market
 Huge active community
 Platform independent (Linux, windows, …)
 Open source
 Versatile
 Backed by Zend, Microsoft, IBM, etc.

12.  “PHP is for hobbyists”
• Low learning curve
• Proper software engineering => proper quality
 “PHP is insecure”
• PHP is a language; it’s the programmer that implements
security
 “PHP is not a real language”
• It’s a dynamic scripting language; but a powerful one

13.  “PHP does not scale”
• Most often PHP is not the bottleneck, DB is
• Language does not scale, architecture does
 “PHP is not ready for Enterprise”
• Already running in mission-critical enterprises
• More on this later

14. When to consider something enterprise, and why

15.  Customizability
• Adherence to business-specific rules
• Adaption of changing business environment
• Change of direction
 Scalability
• Need to scale as business grows
• Change in infrastructure

16.  Security
• Security is priority #1
 Integration
• Needs to work seamlessly with existing solutions
• Should be open for collaboration
 Performance
• Response time
• Load time

17. How we do it in real life

18.  Analysis
 Design
 Coding
 Testing
 Deployment and Maintenance

19.  Scrum
 Extreme Programming (XP)
 Kanban
 OpenAgile

20.  Working software is delivered frequently
 Working software is the principal measure of progress
 Even late changes in requirements are welcomed
 Regular adaptation to changing circumstances
 Customer is a part of the team

21. How to get ready for the enterprise

22.  Simple code  Caching
 DRY  Debugging
 Code quality  Deployment
 Security  Performance
 Testing  Refactoring

23.  This is easier said than done
 Do the simplest thing that could possibly work.
 Do not run for complexity, complexity kills!

24.  Stick to standards
 Open source = open knowledge
 Reuse Experience
 Use Components
 Use Frameworks

25.  Static Code Analysis
• Lint (php -l)
• PHP_CodeSniffer
 Software Metrics
• PHPUnit
• PHP_Depend
 Output validation
• Tidy
• HTML/CSS validation

26.  Security is not an afterthought, it should be built within
the system
 Trust no one
 Handle common issues:
• XSS,
• SQL/Code injection,
• Session fixation,
• Session hijacking,
• CSRF

27.  Unit Tests
 Integration Tests
 Acceptance Tests
 Testing Tools:
• PHPUnit (http://www.phpunit.de)
• Selenium (http://seleniumhq.org)

28.  Use a compiler cache (Zend, APC, etc)
 Cache generated content:
• Whole pages or fragments (disk, squid, memcache)
• Database query results (query cache, memcache)
• External data (memcache, disk)

29.  Create a test to expose each bug
 Keep the test, and run it often
 Tool:
• xdebug (http://www.xdebug.org)
• Tracing
• Remote Debugging

30.  Always automate deployment
 Use 3 Systems
• Development
• Integration/Staging
• Live
 Consider virtual machines / cloud hosting

31.  Do not guess where to start
 Profile your code
• how often are functions called
• how long does execution take
 Look for all possible execution path
 Tool:
• xdebug (http://www.xdebug.org)

32.  Improve the design of software without changing its
behavior
 Not adding new features
 “Cleaning up” code
 Keep refactoring your code constantly
 Use unit tests to ensure you don't break anything

33.  The Negatives
• PHP does not always have all of the functionality needed
• Java development/implementation is more difficult than many
situations require
 The Positives
• PHP will do most of what you need to do, easier.
• Java can fill almost any feature void in PHP for a web-based
deployment

34. Source: Kevin Schroeder (Zend)

36.  PHP is a serious language
 PHP is used in big, real world projects
 Good life cycle for project matters
 PHP can be used in conjunction with other technologies
 When developing software for enterprise:
• Keep things simple
• Accept change
• Test early and often
• Automate tests and deployment

37. Questions ??