I have been watching your discussions regarding xml, PHP's OO support, PHP's readiness for the enterprise.
I personally started using PHP NOT because of its ease of use, NOT because of the powerfulness of the language... but 1. Because it is free, and 2. because of the wide availability of support, tutorials etc. I chose Coldfusion originally because of its ease of use, the tag based language was easy to learn if you are used to html. Then I outgrew basic database insert/update operations (guestbook stuff), and Allaire asked me for £800 plus £300 per year for support, for the non-free version. Then I found PHP. THEN I found its simplicity/speed of development. The rest is history... I am sure that most of you agree that XML has a very big future in the web (or even IS the future). So I think that this should be the current focus of activity, if business feels that this is being left behind/fragmented they will move to another solution very soon. They NEED their buzzwords.... something PHP is not interested in promoting (probably for good reasons) MARKETING is what PHP needs - to the enterprise. Companies are willing to pay 1000's of $£Y for an application server, if they can employ PHP developers rather than java developers for half the cost... they will jump at the chance. There should be IMHO a seperate site for promotion of PHP to the enterprise. The site can have examples of cost savings using PHP, reductions in development times. The site can act as a shop front for PHP Enterprise Version. I believe that companies will be more than willing to pay whatever you can think of for the enterprise benefits like clustering SRM etc... These packages could be packaged into an enterprise product, without referencing the components individually. Then adding support, I dont know what kind of support is provided by Microsoft (telephone email or otherwise...) email support would be easy to provide since there are already support newsgroups for every aspect of PHP. I dont mind heading/hosting of such a project. I have lots of ideas of how to promote PHP, for example, why does nobody approach universities to push them to include PHP in their courses? Java is learnt in university these days, why not PHP?? By the time PHP 5 is available we should have a large collection of marketing material which can then be used by individuals to promote in their own region. Most of this is already out there, collating this is the key. Regards Mike Maybe a change of name for V5 is in order?? It seems to work for M$.... It could be launched as a BRAND NEW application server... Press launch and everything -- PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
