Any good PHP developers here?

[photon]

I'm trying to get a handle on PHP in terms of enterprise application architecture, not just web app development.

Coming from the Java world I know what kinds of things I have available to meet certain needs (middleware, presentation framework, etc), but I'm not familiar with PHP's "ecosystem" and the state of such things for an enterprise grade app is.

Any input on enterprise PHP? Or is PHP even appropriate?

[llama64]

I've never actually done production level Java - can you define what "enterprise" means?

If it's speaking to a standard of interoperability, security and scalability, I honestly don't think there is much difference between the PHP world and the Java world anymore.

Here's a list of the top PHP tools you'll probably want to look into:
- MVC framework - Symfony: http://symfony.com/ (it can play with a number of different database tools and is generally best in class for what it does compared to other frameworks - my opinion)
- Templating language - your choice here (this is PHP's bread and butter). I personally enjoy Twig (http://twig.sensiolabs.org/) as it plays well with symfony
- Deployment tool - Composer: http://getcomposer.org/
- CI server: https://travis-ci.org/ or good ol Jenkins CI (http://jenkins-ci.org/)

One of the places that PHP does not do well in is anything requiring concurrent processing or working with threads. If that's a requirement, PHP is likely not a good choice.

Stick to PHP 5.4 if you can. This version is significantly faster then prior releases, ditches a lot of the legacy crud that gave PHP it's shady reputation and supports a lot of modern coding techniques.

Finally, if the project require speed, you can always checkout HipHop (https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php). It's a tool that will compile PHP code into machine code.

Hope this helps.

[photon]

Originally Posted by llama64

I've never actually done production level Java - can you define what "enterprise" means?

Lol, I guess it's one of those loaded words that means what someone is thinking at the time and nothing else.

Originally Posted by llama64

If it's speaking to a standard of interoperability, security and scalability, I honestly don't think there is much difference between the PHP world and the Java world anymore.

Yeah that's basically the kind of thing I'm looking at, big clients don't care if a language is performant or the stack scales easily, they care that it's been around a long time and has a reputation. I just want to make sure I'm not considering something where I'm going to doing a lot of extra work to deal with the tool rather than the problem.

Thanks for the feedback, greatly appreciated!