Yeap. This is my first technical article. And a not very impressive one at that. While my really cool friends like Chuen Yang is dabbling with Google Maps and its GWT’s impressive development framework, and Herryanto Siatono is busy enjoying himself with Ruby and Rails… here I go writing some out-dated stuff on PHP. PHP? Thought that was passe. Its a little like preaching to the current software community about the advantages of COBOL for financial applications.
But what to do? Small company mah… so have to think of solutions that are easy to develop (so that it is easily outsourceable) and cheap to deploy.
Easy to develop
When we talk about ease of development, I am limited to either PHP or .NET technology. Java is definitely not something that a fresh grad can just pick up from reading a book (even if he is incredibly smart, he will probably get bored off going through the stacks of xml configurations… and yes… those configurations are not accessed through a friendly IDE like Microsoft Visual Studio).
Ruby n Rails is an incredibly RAPID development tool. Problem is, after reading Herryanto Siatono’s blog, I find that the entry level is too high. It appeals to only top-notch programmers, and we all know top-notch programmers like to do super cool projects like http://bookjetty.com, http://searchhouse.sg. Where got time for simple functional database applications?
So I am left with ASP or PHP.
Cheap to Deploy
Well, this second point wipes out .NET as an alternative. Microsoft .NET only runs on Windows server and that almost doubles the hosting costs. Such costs becomes even more real when our infrastructure knowledge must span across both the Windows and Linux domains. Boy… give me a break. Just linux alone gives me a big headache….
So that leaves me with PHP.
