Is PHP ready for enterprise?

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It's been an interesting few months for Zend, the commercial company behind the open source programming language PHP.

In the past few weeks, Zend has teamed up with Rackspace, a leading web hosting provider. It's also signed an agreement with Ibuildings, an Anglo-Dutch software consultancy company, to provide training and support services in the UK. And last year, Zend partnered with Microsoft, despite the software giant offering a competing platform.

A closer look at these partnerships suggests the company - and PHP itself - may be ready for the big time.

Overcoming its roots

Partners such as Rackspace and Microsoft can help overcome one of the largest hurdles in moving into the enterprise arena: the record of PHP development and the strength of Java as the principle software language in enterprise consultancy - both of which stem back to the history of how PHP has evolved culturally within the software community.

With Java as the de facto academic choice, PHP has grown out of the "hobbyist" programmer, generally self-taught and with all of the issues that entails. Until only a few years ago, the concepts of best practice development, coding frameworks and even having a methodology were alien to the hackers of the PHP community, invariably spinning off from the Perl programmers of old.

While these developers were fine for creating the odd microsite, their lack of discipline and structure was akin to an unguided nuke on enterprise projects, while the maturity of the Java community was more like a tomahawk. And IT directors quite rightly didn't want huge fiery ends to their projects by geniuses who had no interest in collaborating when they could enjoy all the benefits from the cool, precise child of Sun.

But now that Zend Framework, the open source scaffold for PHP development, has passed through a troublesome puberty (version one was released last year to some acclaim), and that more and more companies with web sites in PHP are adopting the procedures and practices of a "grown-up" language, does this mean that PHP is going to be seen as a realistic alternative to Java in the enterprise?

Taking on Java

With Zend's star rising, is it enough to overcome the bias in large e-commerce firms? Zend have an uphill struggle on a cultural level: many blue-chip companies have a policy of only hiring developers with a 2:1 Computer Science degree, and the majority of UK universities are still teaching Java.

Even though both languages are object-oriented and have more then cursory similarities, does this mean that Java will continue to be the forerunner?

Vic Wyatt, business development manager for Leeds Metropolitan University, doesn't think so. "We've recently signed with Zend to provide our students a worthwhile group of modules in PHP," said Wyatt, speaking about the university's PHP academy, which helps students learn the language as well as get commercial accreditation via the Zend Certified Engineer exam.

"Java is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as having had its day. We're simply responding to the market, and the market is clearly picking up on PHP," he said.

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