PHP Platform Development & Extensions
Summary
PHP is a web development language that has gained recognition in the past few years due to high profile usage with companies like Facebook, Google and Wikipedia. PHP's strength comes from it's open source roots.
PHP allows for rapid development of applications due to not having to be compiled in order to run, and through it's powerful community. Being open source, there are thousands of extensions, PEAR modules, and pre-compiled modules that are available for usage. Some of the more popular ones include Imagick (image processing) and Memcache (for value-based caching).
Integration
Before development began on the Clearmix PlatformTM, many considerations were made in regards to what should be our language of choice. ASP, ColdFusion, Java and Ruby were all considered, but ruled out due to lacking a combination of the following: community support, open source contributions, scaling, speed and security.
Our usage of PHP resulted in building out a scalable, flexible, MVC based platform. We looked into existing frameworks like CodeIgnitor, CakePHP, Symphony and others, however all lacked the flexibility we knew the Clearmix PlatformTM would need. Over time, we have come to make great usage of many of the open source products available to extend PHP, and our platform has matured to be truly scalable, and as flexible as virtually possible.
Result
The impact of our decision to base our platform in PHP has very strong underlying implications to the performance of your community, and the rate at which you experience upgrades and new features. Our decision to use PHP means that we are able to deploy changes, upgrades, and new features very quickly. There is little overhead for deploying new releases, since with PHP, we've been able to streamline our development cycle.
