Real-World Solutions for Developing High-Quality PHP Frameworks and Applications

INTRODUCTION

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

—C.S. Lewis

ABOUT THIS BOOK

According to the TIOBE Programming Community Index, PHP is the most popular programming language after C/C++ and Java.^[1] Gartner predicts that dynamic programming languages will be critical to the success of many next-generation application development efforts and sees PHP as one of the strongest representatives of this type of programming language.^[2] Since the beginning, PHP was designed for web application development and was likely one of the driving forces behind the dot-com boom at the turn of the millennium. Since then, PHP has matured to a general-purpose programming language that supports both procedural and object-oriented programming. In the past, subjects such as performance, scalability, and security were hot in the PHP community. In recent years, however, architecture and quality are getting more attention. In our consulting practice, we see more enterprises that want to modernize their PHP-based software and to base their development processes on agile values. The modernization of a code base is usually driven by a migration from PHP4 to PHP5 or by the introduction of a framework to standardize development.

Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that a plethora of PHP frameworks exists. All these frameworks want to help with solving recurring use cases and the standardization of application development. Dynamic and static testing techniques ...