4o3.net

I have spent the last 6 years working for small web development agencies (Commonly places that do both web and print) and they all, and all the places I have delt with as a result have not taken anything on board from PHP5. You could drop them on a PHP4 server and their code would run just as happily. They do not use any of the benifits that PHP5 has given them. About all that has changed is they have lost their reliance on register_globals. Why is this?

In my opinion, both from my own experience and from talking to other developers in the same world as I am there are a number of reasons.

1. The comfort zone : This is first and foremost amongst all reasons. This has been seen time and time again during the end of life of any development platform. Many people when faced with the fact that they should change the way they work, that they should evolve their skill set, they will shy away. They will make excuses like “I don’t have the time to learn PHP5″ and “But I already have loads of functions written for PHP4.
2. The cheap hosting market: Ireland’s market leader in the hosting market is register365. In fact this website is hosted with register 365. As far as their shared servers go (Which is where most small web development firms will be hosting) the majority of the Linux ones are still running PHP4 (As of the last time I was able to check, which was little over a month ago). Their PHP5 servers are not up capable of running the frameworks and librarys that the foremost PHP sites tell us to run (A prime example would be the apparent lack of anything but SqLite drivers enabled for the PDO extention). Of course they have their reasons for this. There are thousands of sites hosted on them by paying customers that may not function if they were to upgrade.
3. The state of the market: To by honest, why should they upgrade? They will be more skilled developers afterwards, but in the small web development market their is little incentive to improve in this way. Their pay is unlikely to increase, they are likely to have to learn to do this in their own time. While becoming a better programmer in theory opens up more employment oppertunities to them, alot of them work in small firms in the first place because they either do not want to (or can not) work in a city. This could be due to family comitments or any number of other reasons.

What can be done about this?

There are a couple of approaches to dealing with this. The first and foremost is to remove the learning curve. When a PHP4 developer opens up any of the popular php blogs he is faced with things like MVC and expansive frameworks. He is bombarded with things like test driven development.  How can this be delt with better by people looking to improve the development community in Ireland?

Take simple real world examples with a shallow learning curve that would apply directly to the small studio developer. For example, you may demonstrate how we can write a class for dealing with contact form submissions. How this can enable us to fully re-use code rather than the simple ‘Copy/Paste/Edit’ that goes on with most developers. Then you may demonstrate how using OO concepts like inheritence or interfaces you can enable this class to stick the information directly into a database, or send it via SMS. Work up from there.

The other thing that needs to be addressed is the hosting market. But maybe this has been addressed by someone already. Do any of the Irish hosting providers offer a low price PHP5 enviroment (With the relevant trimmings) in either a domian by domain or a reseller basis?

Please give me your opinions on this.

This post has been updated to reflect Stephens comment that the non-dedicated accounts that were with hosting365 are now controlled by register365 and that part of the company was bought out during the year.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 5:45 pm and is filed under php. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.