Tag: php

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TIL the server side of Slack is written in PHP. How about that?

Slack uses PHP for most of its server-side application logic, which is an unusual choice these days. Why did we choose to build a new project in this language? Should you?
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PHP-the-language has many flaws, which undoubtedly have slowed these efforts down, but PHP-the-environment has virtues which more than compensate for those flaws. And the options for improving on PHP’s language-level flaws are pretty impressive. On the balance, PHP provides better support for building, changing, and operating a successful project than competing environments. I would start a new project in PHP today, with a reservation or two, but zero apologies.

by Keith Adams, Slack Engineering

Source: Taking PHP Seriously

Rather interesting to learn that the server side of Slack is written in PHP. I guess I assumed it was a Ruby or Go thing. I think it’s useful to hear about success stories for a mature language like PHP. It shows us that just because something has been around for awhile doesn’t mean it can’t do something cool.

 

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onwCloud, CERN, and petabytes of data

As a result of this, for ownCloud 9.0 we developed new Storage and Sharing APIs, which make it possible to write storage connectors that access and use advanced capabilities and metadata directly from the storage. One example is the EOS filesystem that is developed and used by CERN to store and manage their huge amount of scientific data. This filesystem can provide metadata, such as ETags, FileIDs, and more, which can be used by ownCloud 9.0 directly, avoiding the need to store this in the ownCloud database and providing the sought-after reduction in overhead. The option to leverage existing sharing capabilities of the storage layer (if available) is also possible, which removed the need to store sharing information in the central database.

— Open collaboration: ownCloud, CERN, and AARNET | Opensource.com https://opensource.com/business/16/3/cern-and-owncloud?sc_cid=70160000000q67aAAA

The new release of ownCloud 9 brings a number of new features including improvements to the API that allows CERN to use ownCloud as a frontend to their massive data store. Other new features beef up the Libre office based collaboration tools and add additional storage options.

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Java still top programming language, PHP at 6, JavaScript at 7

The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.
The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.

Source: TIOBE Software: Tiobe Index

This index is one of those things that is easy to find and easier to forget about in the noise of the Internet but it is the best way to get a quick read on the languages being used in the real world. Too often we are over influenced by “flavor of the month” projects and languages that distort how work is really getting done in the broader world. I’m not surprised that Java and C are the top languages since those are the languages of choice for most business applications. Python, PHP, and JavaScript are the core academic and web languages. The thing that makes me smile is that Ruby ranks below Perl. And COBOL is still in the top 20.