Ask About PHP

Later this week I’ll be attending a talk on interoperability, organised by Microsoft. A friend of mine working at the local Microsoft office is organising the event. He was asking me to help spread the word about the event.

We got talking and from what he tells me about his job as an ‘Evangelist’, I get the distinct feeling that Microsoft is aiming to swing those companies with mixed platforms to using more MS-centric solutions, “because MS products enables technical interoperability out of the box with other vendors”.

That got me thinking about which is better, companies running different technology platforms versus those that focuses on a specific platform?

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Coach Wei was wondering why ‘Cool Kids’ choose Ruby or PHP over Java? In his post, the power of Java is a “perfect fit for the areas where websites may need more than markups or scripting, such as middleware logic”, whereas PHP or Ruby are not ideal for building such middleware.

For example, PHP (and Ruby) are good for simple and lightweight implementations, but sites like Facebook which started with PHP, should be ideal for Java because of it’s growing complexity.

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A buddy of mine, Chris, recently did a presentation about Microsoft’s efforts to embrace non-MS technology - like PHP. This presentation was held during the December meet-up of the Singapore PHP User Group.

His video presentation was about an hour long, and covered the following topics:

• SQL Server PHP driver
• Open XML and PHP
• Cardspace and PHP
• Live Services and PHP
• Silverlight and PHP
• Server Core , IIS7, PHP and MySQL

So, go ahead and watch the video…

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Last year, on 31 March 2007, the good folks at Sydney turned off their lights for 1 hour - Earth Hour. By doing so, they’ve made it possible for each and every one of us to take an action on global warming.

Earth Hour is back for 2008 and now other cities around the world, like Toronto, Chicago and many more getting into the act. Are you?

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Welcome to the first post of Ask About PHP, the site that’s dedicated to bringing PHP to the everyday person. I’m sure you can find many great resources on how to get started with PHP on the web and in print, but many of these resources assume you have some background in IT, or programming or understand the workings of the Internet in some way. Here, I’m going to try to keep it simple.

I hope, this site will one day be a useful place to guide those of you who wants to start to carve a corner of the ‘Great Web’ for yourself but you don’t know where to start. Websites of today are no longer just ‘pages’ of static information - with technology like PHP, you can have your own online shop, your own blog - your own whatever.

So why PHP? Well, it’s as good a place to start as any, and I like PHP - it’s useful for everyone who wants to start or operate their own website.

Anyway, do drop me a line to say hello at webbie@askaboutphp.com

Have a nice day!