Happy Birthday PHP!

About me - Jani Tarvainen

• Working on the web professionally from 2000 in various roles in development, support operations and management
• By day I help build the web at Exove
• By night I do things at Malloc for fun
• Brainfarts on Twitter: @velmu

Anno Domini 1995

• Windows 95 with the Start Menu launches - people hate dat button
• Apple is doomed - tries to save itself by allowing Macintosh clones
• On June 8th Rasmus Lerdorf releases
  Personal Home Page Tools (PHP tools)

PHP growing up

• 2000: PHP 4 is launched in May 2000
• 2001: The first official PHP Conference
• 2002: Yahoo! adopts PHP as their back-end technology
• 2003: WordPress is created
• 2004: Facebook launches on LAMP
• 2005: Symfony 1 is released
• 2006: Zend Framework released

Random notes from my life with PHP

• For me it's a good tool that I know how to use
• Valid complaints and annoyances such as inconsistent in function names
• GoPHP5.org initiative gave the language more credibility
• PHP 6 was a joke - but a better option than the Perl 6 or Python 3 fate
• The PHP community copies from others with pride (C, NPM, Java...)

PHP Today

• PHP has remained relevant for twenty years
• Vanilla LAMP? People naturally adopt Varnish, ElasticSearch, Redis...
• Everyone is a PHP user: Wikipedia, Facebook, WordPress...
• The PSR-n and Composer - not your father's PHP!
• The Symfony HttpKernel component is increasingly everywhere

Staying relevant (applies to devs and tools)

• The world moves pretty fast
  • PNGs, Web fonts, CSS rounded corners, etc. not that old, really...
• Invest in the basics
• Don't fall in love with technology
  • Dispose as needed (Rasmus killed APC for 5.5)
  • Beware of love at first sight (the hottest .js of the day)
• DX (Developer Experience) is paramount
• Make sharing code as easy as possible

So.... how is PHP doing?

• JavaScript is the popular kid now (also released 1995)
• A PHP developer position might not sound "exciting"
• For reliability and low risks PHP is (still) a nobrainer
• We have learned to share code, but separate camps remain
• The language itself was stagnant from 2005 to 2009
• From 5.3 onwards things have picked up and it's looking pretty good

Immediate future

• Take a look at Puli for resource packaging
• Symfony3 will be released this year
• PHP 7 will be released this year
  • New features
  • Backwards compatible
  • Improved performance
• Competition: Facebook is investing in their alternative runtime, HHVM

Is PHP the cobol of the future?

• Maybe, but I think more so with application specific PHP
  • Meanwhile in 2038: Argh! that mission critical Drupal 9 broke and we're truly fscked now!
• Modern PHP allows you to refactor bit by bit
• A lot of PHP is old and heavily invested in
  • Flipping tables and starting from scratch with Node might not be an option everyone can afford - and would it make it better anyhow?

That guy

ALSO THE NODE GUY WHO WAS A RUBY GUY THAT REWROTE IT ALL BECAME A RUST GUY AND MOVED TO THAILAND TO BECOME A NOMAD STARTUP GUY

— PHP CEO (@PHP_CEO) May 30, 2015

Cool links of the day

• Help test PHP7
• PHP data structures (and the impact of php 7 on them)
• PHP ProcessManager for Request-Response Applications
• Sulu CMF
• H2O - the optimized HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2 server

The end

• Happy Birthday PHP! :)
• Questions? No? Thanks.