Following is a brief article of tips and advices regarding PHP given by masters of this profession. This article consists of advices shared by Rasmus Lerdorf, Matt Mullenweg and many such notable names who have contributed in making the internet as big as it is today.
The popularity of PHP in today’s reign of internet needs no explanation. The rise that PHP has seen in the recent past is a result of its efficiency and cost-effectiveness. PHP has been used widely across various sectors, in different ways to serve a host of purposes. However, there are some things that one must take care of while using PHP. We have gathered a few words of advice from the greatest names in the business on the Internet.
Don’t use PHP for everything
The father of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf himself states that PHP was developed as a problem solving script. It was not made to serve a variety of projects. The origin had more to do with catering to a practical web based problem rather than a cool new internet invention.
Therefore its usage should be limited to as much as required. Although PHP is one great tool to work with but, in case PHP fails to feel fit for one’s requirement, they should simply move on and use a language that is most suited to their nature of the product.
TO make PHP more scalable, more and more tables and MYSQL should be used
With WordPress is occupying the center stage, Matt Mullenweg has proved the metal of his PHP mastery. Mullenweg explains that using one colossal table is not as effective as using separate and individual MYSQL tables for each and every blog. That escalates your site’s scalability and makes your efforts towards it much more countable. Multiple tables and migrating data from them enable the blogs to run much faster. Together with some heavy caching, and clever database treatment, Matt has presented that tremendously popular sites like Facebook and WordPress.com too can handle the intensive traffic using PHP.
Beware of the User
David Child is an established specialist in PHP. He has worked in the UK for many development companies. He is also the man behind the scenes of the website called Added Bytes, which gives details regarding many programming languages.
Dave advises to write the source code keeping in mind that the users are no angels. They may just pick up stuff and try to clone/hijack your website. He explains secure ways of writing source codes on his website.
Batch Processing for Background processes
Jack Herrington, the IBM developer Works expert is a renowned writer in the field of PHP. His study indicates that Batch Processing should be used to enable the background processes to run by them.
There are some tasks which take longer to finish than the other tasks; however, spending extra time with them isn’t wise. He suggests using batch processes to let these programs continue and finish. He also suggests that instead of making it a complex mesh of by using too much threading on the servers, it is best that simple combinations of PHP, MySQL and Cron be used to get the perfect results.
Error Reporting should be turned on Immediately
David Cummings, the owner of a software company and an expert in content Management systems has won multiple awards in this field. He states that turning the error reporting on immediately pays off in the long run. Error reporting, more often than not, makes finding the actual reason of the error quite simple. This way you can locate and solve the problem as soon as possible.
When you can save yourself the agony of scouring for the bugs, then why not. Lay back and let PHP do its work. It will point at the bugs and save you so much time, you’d be thanking Rasmus!
Having said this, we can all mutually agree that PHP as a technology has so much to offer in its kitty, that with a little attention and a close eye for development, the web world is soon to expand into a universe and more.
