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› 2008: The end of PHP?

Happy New Year people, welcome to 2008.

2008 is the year when PHP 4 stops getting supported, August 8th 2008 (or 08-08-08) is d-day for the end of security fixes on the PHP 4 branch, the final bug fixes have already been released.

PHP has great advantages and disadvantages. It's easy to learn, it's fast, and it's used to run some of the biggest web applications on the internet such as Facebook and MediaWiki (Wikipedia), however in my opinion PHP nativly encourages people to program in a sloppy way, which can quickly become a maintainability headache. This is before taking into account the transition from PHP4 to PHP5 and the timescale available before a security hole is found after 08-08-08.

There are of course new kids on the block, namely Ruby on Rails and my personal favorite Django, OK so these are "frameworks" and not languages like PHP is, but from the outset of a new project working with these tools, you're sent in the right direction.

I used to be a pretty big PHP "fanboy", always recomending it to people, especially those on the ASP train, however i couldn't imagine recommending it to anyone anymore. I'd recommend either Rails or Django, they're both written to create web applications, and to create them in a maintainable way, from the start. They both have great communities of support and high class documentation, so my question is, Would you still recommend someone to use PHP to build a web application?

› Ebay don't use SQL joins

I've been reading about ebay's architecture over at highscalability.com and from their research they conclude that ebay do all their data "joining" on application servers rather than using the bottleneck that is a back end database.

The main reason stated for this is "app servers are cheap, databases are the bottleneck". This is a pretty extreme move, but I suppose ebay is a pretty big site, they apparently serve 26 billion sql queries per day, quite a feat.

› Sunday: The Day of Work

It's Sunday evening, I've finished work for the day.

Im slowly starting to get used to this whole Sunday->Thursday working week. Well I'm not, on Thursday I thought it was Friday, and on Friday I thought it was Saturday, and Saturday really did feel like a Sunday, I'm sure I'll get used to it, besides, it'll take away from the whole "Monday is a bad day to spend 1/7th of your life" thing!

I really like Dubai so far. The biggest thing that I noticed was how big everything is. Compared to Leeds, UK where there was 1 (ugly) big building, everything is bigger than that, and they all got built quicker! My new apartment that I'll be moving into in about a week is opposite the Burj Dubai which is currently the tallest building in the world and it's still getting bigger! There is a massive mall here called The Mall of the Emirates but a "big" mall isn't good enough for Dubai, so they are building some more bigger ones!

There is a great community of ex-pats out here, and everyone is really welcoming and friendly. I imagine some of this is to do with not many people having family out here, and so your friends become your family. I'm really loving my job too, I'm sure I'll have plenty more to post about that in the future!

Leave me a comment, it'd be nice to hear from a few people!

› Goodbye england!

I'm now at the airport.

Flying to Dubai in an hour to start a new chapter in my career and life. It seems weird, I don't actually feel like I'm going at the moment.

I'm really looking forward to starting my new job at Dubizzle, and can't wait to start.

Time to go and board!

› Pownce Lessons Learned

Pownce Lessons Learned Pownce is a social network tool written in Django. The slides are interesting if you are thinking about building a web application in Django.

UPDATE: This has also been sumarised on High Scalability.com

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