News.Com posted a story today about the growing popularity of the LAMP Platform. As someone who has been involved in LAMP development for the last 5 or 6 years, I have a few observations:

- Yes! More money & recognition for PHP Programmers

It isn’t uncommon to see J2EE developers with only 2 - 4 years of experience making $60k - $80k per year, even here in Utah. PHP Developers (even good ones, with OOP experience) usually top out at around $50k per year. Hopefully the increasing popularity will make PHP development a more financially rewarding experience.

- It isn’t the only tool out there

As much as I like the LAMP platform, I really hope we don’t see companies trying to port massive enterprise systems over to it. PHP and mySQL have significantly matured over the last few years, but I still feel they lack several features necessary for them to be considered ‘enterprise ready’. There are plenty of small and medium-sized (and even some big ones) that could be very easily done in PHP instead of Java or .NET, but some applications are best built with other tools. Some of the biggest programming disasters I’ve seen have involved using PHP to do projects too big, although some of that may have come from the development process and not the language itself.

- Can we stay disciplined with PHP?

I think PHP requires a little more discipline than languages like Java or .NET. A big problem I have seen with larger PHP projects is that discipline tends to break down at certain points and little hacks get thrown in for performance or to get something out the door quickly. In order for PHP development to work, development processes need to be more organized and more disciplined. One of the purported benefits of PHP is that you can do without this organization and discipline, which is true to a point. This sort of development process, however, will come back to bite developers in the long run.

On that note, I hope the LAMP Platform continues to grow in popularity within the businessworld, and look forward to using it for a long time.