PHP In Business Part 2

By: Keith Hearne

Following on from the last article in which we talked about in business, we take a deeper look at the technology and give a further insight into the benefits of PHP for your business.

1. Efficient Development and Maintenance

PHP can help to quantify the roles between developer and designer, offering a variety of libraries to work with page templates, which introduces efficient development methodology and simplifies maintenance. Developer's focus on the application logic, and designers can change the layout of a dynamic page without involving the developer or interfering with the program logic, making for faster application development, maintenance becomes easier and both can be handled by separate team members.

2. Faster Time to Market

IT managers and developers demand high productivity from their development environments. PHP is lightweight, can solve complex web development problems quicker and its easily to use in comparison to other, more cumbersome solutions. Programmers familiar with C, Perl, or Java, can get acquainted with PHP in a matter of days, producing small database enabled applications after just one afternoon.

3. Connectivity

PHP offers a broad range of database connectivity, both open source and commercial. The native database access offers better performance and tighter control than layered access methods such as ODBC (which is still available for databases not supported natively). PHP also supports most current Internet standards: IMAP, FTP, POP, XML, WDDX, LDAP, NIS, and SNMP to list but a few. All this from one common tool set, without the need for expensive third party modules.

4. Existing Enterprise Logic

Since version 4.0, PHP supports direct access to Java objects on any system with a Java Virtual Machine available, as well as Distributed COM on Windows. This means a significantly lower Cost of Ownership and enables business to leverage existing technology and develop new applications in an easier way.

5. Portability

PHP has the advantage of being platform independent and can run on all popular platforms, including Linux, Windows, MacOS, and even OS/2. This portability is the key to scalable applications, so there is no need to worry about platform-specific features.

6. Performance

PHP can provides a performance gain and with free add-ons such as The Zend Optimizer from Zend Technologies, can perform on-the-fly code optimizations to enhance the running speed of PHP applications (typically executing 40% to 100% faster).

echnology is getting faster, development is getting quicker and so the methods employed to achieve this must be reliable, robust and fast. If your business requires rapid development, performance, scalability, security and more then PHP is a strong option for you to consider.