There are far fewer resources for learning how to use PHP within a professional corporate environment. Many new PHP programmers are rarely exposed to topics like version control, cache mechanisms, ticketing and bug reporting systems, even communication and diagramming tools. They learn in small, easily controlled environments and most learn to rely upon those small environments. The goal of PHP User Groups should be to teach solid PHP, but also to get the idea across that PHP alone is not enough if you plan to work professionally.

More importantly, User Groups should also serve as the point of communication between programmers and businesses. At DallasPHP, we do everything we can to promote the PHP job market, not just to help our members to find jobs and help companies meet their development needs, but to prove to those companies that aren’t quite convinced of PHP’s viability that there IS a PHP job market. PHP hiring used to be “Do you know anybody? Because I don’t want to wade through unqualified applicants.” As a result, you only found help if you knew somebody who knew somebody. You only found jobs the same way. PHP has to move past that point. If you want a viable job market, hiring can’t be a secret. If nobody knows there’s a viable market, you’ll never attract new people. We post every lead we get. Sometimes that means dozens just in the north Dallas area. You’d never know that by looking in the local want ads.

The part you should be interested in is that cooperation with the job market also serves the group directly – some of this area’s larger PHP employers are enthusiastic DallasPHP participants, making their own current employees available to speak and demonstrate technologies they are most dependent upon. We get to use their professional experience and knowledge to attract and educate members, while they get better educated job applicants and a more direct means of interacting with a larger pool of specifically local PHP talent. Their attendance always raises the level of discussion, and a good complicated discussion generally keeps them challenged and involved.

A good presentation here can easily draw 30 to 60 attendees, most fully employed and many highly skilled. Businesses love that. Recruiters love that. Experienced developers love that. Novice developers love just having the opportunity to hear these conversations and are more than willing to jump in when they’re confident enough. By embracing the entire PHP ecosystem instead of just the first stage of it, we all win.

User Groups have always appealed to novices, that part’s easy. Now, they MUST make themselves appealing to the fully employed. At least appealing enough to get them off their asses and involved after a long, hard day’s work. That’s not easy. Fortunately, most PHP developers, being self-taught, are more than a little obsessive about the topic. Keep them challenged and you’ll keep them in attendance. (Where they can be easily found when needed.)

PHP has a good learning curve. I think most JAVA people can do PHP within 3 weeks. PHP people can’t do JAVA in 3 weeks (most of them). But JAVA has a steady background of certification and education. Many universities in The Netherlands (where I live) give JAVA education. So, people who hire programmers are on the look out for JAVA programmers because of their background and because it’s a ‘buzz’ word still. You can’t iron that out.

Installing PHP is easier than setting up a complete JAVA environment and all the dependencies. Talking about maintainance, JAVA is a burden. You can’t upgrade that easily with JAVA because of these dependencies. You pull one part of the framework out, the whole thing might collapse. Running the same old versions because you might break it, is not like staying on the edge.

Before PHP, you had Perl (and C CGI before that) as the defacto language on the web. Perl had their modules and could do some OO, but it wasn’t capable of Enterprise stuff either. Now, companies still ask for Perl developers because of their maintainance issues, but also because in the background Perl still does some tricks. In that field Python is growing too. Stuff PHP can do too. You don’t write a shell script in JAVA just for the sake of it. Maintainance again. PHP can do SAPI and CLI pretty easily. You only need 1 programmer who can do both server maintainance and webscripting with PHP.

PHP does OO now and the community is still huge and growing everyday. Advantages of PHP are scalability, ease of use, multiplatform, speed, integration with many things etc. On top of that PHP is interpreted, while you can make your own extensions if needed (done so myself today for the first time).

So, I don’t think PHP’s problem is PHP itself. Many huge websites are running on LAMP (can’t see a J in there sorry). Security flaws are in JAVA also. I think if you want to ’sell’ PHP, you should ’show’ PHP. People ’show’ Ruby nowadays as if it is all we ever wanted. But Ruby doesn’t perform (yet). It doesn’t scale (yet). It doesn’t read either. I can’t stand the syntax. PHP can do Rails (and it does), so why the hype about Rails? It’s not like Rails is cool because of Ruby. Rails is just a way of thinking. Ruby is just a method to get you there.

All in all. PHP has proven itself over and over already. People who got into JAVA are the ones who rather think ‘complex’ than in ’solutions’. Period.

- Unomi -