From: Nathan Rixham > I find myself wondering about the state of the PHP community (and > related community with a PHP focus), so, here's a bunch of questions -
> > What other languages and web techs do you currently use other than PHP? > - if you include html or css please include version, if js then > preferred libs, and whether client or server side. Netbeans, Perl, PostgreSQL, Selenium, XHTML 1.0 Transitional. > What's your previous language/tech trail? In chronological order - Languages: Fortran IV, 8008/8080 Machine language, BASIC, Assembler (my primary strength), C, Pascal, PL/M, Perl, C++ (Still don't understand the purpose of objects or classes). OS: N*, CP/M, CP/M-86, CCP/M, PC-DOS, Eunice (NCR), Unix, Minix, Linux. Kernels: SMX, Xinu, Ctask (I still maintain code for all three). > Are you considering any new languages or techs, and if so which? > - names / links No. > Is PHP your hobby/interest, primary development language, just learning or? Primary development language at the moment. > How many years have you been using PHP regularly? 3 > How many years have you been working with web technologies? 16 > Did you come from a non-web programming background? Yes, embedded systems and POS. I still maintain software for a variety of data comm devices, cash registers and credit card terminals. > Is your primary role web developer or designer? Web Developer. > In your developer life, are you an employer, and employee, contractor, > freelancer, part of a team of equal standing members? Employee. > Do you tend to work on jobs for geo-local clients, clients in the same > country, or do you work internationally 'on the web'? Same subcontinent (North America) at the moment. Subject to change as we now have offices on three continents and clients on four. > How do you get your projects? do they come to you, word of mouth, do you > hunt and bid for projects, code call, visit clients, target clients > individually you think you can help, or? > - not looking for trade secrets, just to get enough for an overall picture. A story is posted to a product backlog by one of the product managers. The development/QA team refines it, breaks it into tasks and schedules them for one or more sprints. > Do you have any frustrations with the PHP community, do you find you > want to talk shop but can't, or find people to work with but can't, have > projects in mind you want to do but can't find people to do them with etc? My biggest problem is that the web community appears to be moving exclusively to OOP, which I see only as a lot of extraneous overhead with no significant benefits in return. But it seems to have been the fad du jure for the past decade. My second issue is that the community is very fragmented. The PHP developers are in one mailing list, the NetBeans developers in another, Postgres is all by itself and testing tools and frameworks are all over the map with no guideposts or cross-references available between them. I can't even find where some of the support groups can be contacted. > Do you network with other PHP'ers in real life - meetups etc, do you > tend to shy away, or do you find you circulate in other web related but > non PHP focussed communities? There are a half-dozen of us in the company, and we have an irregularly scheduled conference call roughly once a month to discuss issues, tools and style. New development is moving to Java on Liferay, and only a few of us will be moving to that platform. > Are you a member or any other web tech communities, opensource efforts, > or standardization bodies - again, if so which? I currently subscribe to mailing lists for CentOS, Netbeans, Perl, PHP, Postgres, Selenium, Slackware and TightVNC. I also read newsgroups for Linux, Perl and CP/M. I attempt to answer questions on each, but only when I have gone through similar trials. I don't do web based support forums for obvious reasons. > Are there any efforts, projects or initiatives which are floating your > boat right now and that your watching eagerly (or getting involved with)? I am closely following my 401K to determine when I will be able to retire. (I will be eligible for Social Security in five months.) At that point I will probably throw out every PC I own and find something more relaxing to spend my time on. However, I do plan to keep the Alpha and Sparc stations. Outside of that, I like test-more.php from the Apache-Test project and Mike Lively's test-harness.php since I was already familiar with TAP from the Perl Test::Harness. I have reported some bugs to Mike and adopted the pair with YAML files for automating unit tests. I would like to see more work done in this area. In particular, we need help getting this harness to work under the Hudson CI system. As I said before, I have no class and don't do objects, so it has to be fully compatible with procedural programming. One other resource I haven't seen in the PHP community is an organized collection of free and public domain code resources. Perl has CPAN, C has Snippets <http://snippets.snippets.org/index.php>, and there are other similar resources for other languages. I haven't found the like for PHP yet. Bob McConnell -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
