PHP is not Java! - PHP

Plat_Forms 2012 announcement

nospam@example.com (Gaylord Aulke) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:48:35 +0100

Heise and the university of Berlin just announced the next iteration of the Plat_Forms programming contest. This time, the task all teams need to implement will be more "cloudy", not that frontend-heavy. Hopefully, PHP will perform better than in 2011 this time. If you have a team of 3 PHP developers and if you think you can compete with Ruby and Java: registration is open!

Plat_Forms 2011 aftermath

nospam@example.com (Gaylord Aulke) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:11:23 +0100

In January 2011, the second iteration of the Plat_Forms contest had been conducted by FU Berlin Heise and OSBF. 16 Teams with 3 developers each were all given the same task. They had to implement as much as possible of the given requirements in a given time span in a controlled environment. After the event, the resulting code has been evaluated by the team around Prof. Lutz Prechelt and Ulrich Stärk. The results were then presented on November 25, 2011.

For the PHP Side, i was asked to select the participants. To provide a good coverage of current PHP best practices, i selected 2 zend framework teams, 1 symfony team and a flow3 team (as an additional influence besides the general purpose frameworks).

After the great success of PHP in the previous contest in 2007, we expected after all the improvements in the PHP space during the last years, that PHP would be even more successful than before. But we were supprised:

So how can this be interpreted?

Java was almost constant, slightly improved coverage. Perl decreased somewhat, that might be discussed elsewhere. Ruby was very good, but there was no numbers for 2007 so no trend can be derived here.

But what happened to PHP? Less coverage than 2007 and much less consistency between the teams (one quite good, the other 3 rather bad). Did we select the wrong teams? Did they have a bad day?

Why did all the work the PHP community did during the last years in terms of software architecture, frameworks and quality not lead to better productivity?

Ok, the results for robustness have improved compared to 2007 for PHP. But the size of PHP applications was less consistent than in 2007: Some PHP applications were quite compact, others were as big as the Java applications but while covering less functionality.

To me these results match my observations during the last years in PHP space. The idea of PHP being "super-productive" needs to be questioned at least. Maybe the PHP community is on a journey and the destination has not been reached yet. We will see with the results of the next iteration of this contest...

Side Notes:

While Ruby Teams spent much more time writing automated tests than everybody else, they still got the highest functional coverage.

While in 2007 the PHP teams were most interested in customer's wished, in 2011, Ruby asked the most detail questions.

Plat_Forms Contest 2011: it was great fun

nospam@example.com (Gaylord Aulke) — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 21:33:17 +0100

On tuesday and wenesday last week, the 2011 version of the Plat_Forms contest took place. It was organized by FU Berlin, OSBF and publishing company Heise.

16 Teams of 4 (+1) different web application development platforms were given the same requirements and two days of time to develop as much as possible. I was again amazed by the great atmosphere and the cooperative attitude of the teams. This year, there were teams of PHP, Perl, Java, Ruby and one Javascript-On-The-Server Team.

The organizers around Prof. Lutz Prechelt and Eduard Heilmayr did a fantastic job to provide a great environment to work in. They will be evaluating the work of the different teams now and present their scientific results in a couple of months from now.

Some impressions of the contest can be seen in the contest blog.

Spot the java guys...

The jury

Plat_Forms contest 2011

nospam@example.com (Gaylord Aulke) — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 19:40:34 +0100

In 2007 there was a programming competition conducted by the university of berlin and "Heise Verlag":
Different programming platforms for web applications (Java vs. PHP vs. Perl) should be compared and the result were analysed in many aspects. I took part as a member of the Zend team and had a lot of fun there.
Now Prof. Prechelt from FU Berlin is setting up another challenge. In January 2011, the contest will be repeated. With more platforms and even more fun this time. The official announcement can be seen here: http://www.plat-forms.org/platforms-announcement

We are searching for 3-4 teams from the PHP area to participate there.
If you feel you and your 3-person team belong to the top level PHP developers and if you want to take the challenge and compete against Java, .NET, Ruby, Python and Perl teams, feel free to apply now!
See you there