Mistake 18. Underestimating PHP

I'm a technology whore, plain and simple. Some geeks fall in love with a particular technology and advocate its use in all circumstances. I like to think that I'm more pragmatic and have the breath of knowledge to choose the best technology for a job. I'll use the J# .NET abomination on the desktop, while importing open-source Java to create Flash and hooking the whole thing up to a PHP server side solution. I'll two-time any technology faster than you can say "Ruby on Rails".

I'll two-time any technology faster than you can say "Ruby on Rails".

I usually prefer PHP for smaller server-side solutions that are easy to develop, maintain and deploy. Also, it's easy to find a low-cost service provider to host PHP online. This blog runs on PHP. Our bugtracker is PHP. But the main concern with PHP has always be scalability - it might run well on a single server, but what about when there's 10,000 users all logging in at the same time.

So, it was with some interest that I read this Infoworld article of the top 20 IT mistakes to avoid. Mistake 18 is underestimating PHP - seems the common knowledge on this one is changing. This has big ramifications for e-learning in particular, where the most popular open source LMS for small installations has been the PHP based Moodle. Questions about Moodle's scalability have often been posed, and you can see on their forums there's a lot of thoughtful comments with some impressive results reported. So moving forward, with the shift in attitude towards PHP, comes a shift in attitude towards Moodle.

Posted by Alexander at October 12, 2005 04:10 PM

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