PHP Québec is a professional association of PHP users in this province. Its goal is to promote the use of PHP among industrials and programmers.
Yesterday, I had the chance to attend a series of presentations on the subject. It is a monthly event organized by PHP Quebec. On this occasion, we had two presenters.
The first presentation was by Marc Andre Lanciault. He presented XOOPS which is a framework used to build websites. His company uses SmartFactory, which is a collection of XOOPS modules, to accelerate website development. Using different real world examples, he showed us how it is possible to add different modules to perform a wide variety of tasks including managing comments, adding date, adding tags or adding ajax capabilities. Finally, he showed us the opensource branch of his company, the smartfactory. Marc said that all the modules built for his clients are afterwards available in that website.
Damien Séguy, the next presenter, talked about the LAMP Architecture. He presented different server architectures and showed in each case the drawbacks and benefits of each configuration. He showed the differences of scaling vertically (scale up) and scaling horizontally (scale out). Later on, he described different approaches meant to allow databases to deal with an increased set of transactions. He then illustrated by giving examples of startups like flickr, twitter or slideshare and how they solved their scaling problem. Finally, He concluded by talking about the properties of the cluster and its usefulness in high traffic websites, due to its property of constant response no matter how many transactions are requested. For an in-depth look on this subject, I would highly recommend Building Scalable Websites by Carl Henderson.
Overall, although I am a PHP illiterate, I found the presentations quite interesting, especially the second one that was more about architecture design than pure PHP. I had the chance to talk to Yann who is the president of PHP Quebec. He insisted on the fact that php is still widely used among organizations like Bell Canada and such. Nonetheless, I think that php is going to be set aside by technologies that allow for rapid prototyping and agile development, like ruby on rails. In addition, the php developers I met there were either developing third party applications, working as freelancers or in well established companies. In comparison, Montreal On Rails, which I attended for the second time last Tuesday, is sponsored by Karabunga inc, a startup based just outside of Montreal. It was held at StandoutJobs headquarters, another Montreal startup. This really proves that the people involved in the rails community are the same as the ones pushing the envelope in innovation, and the movement has just started. This is just my opinion. The debate is open.
