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Rod Smith recently attended the Zend PHP Conference and Expo. An increasing number of next-generation business and social-networking Web applications over the next couple years will be originating from their users, rather than from software companies.
Not only will the applications be conceptualized by non-technical people, they will be built by them, he said. Rod Smith, IBM's vice president of Internet emerging technology, addressed the opening session of the conference.
A healthy number of those new Web-centric applications will be constructed using the open-source middleware programming language PHP, he said.
PHP, which was introduced in 1999 as Personal Home Page by Zend Technologies Ltd., based in Cupertino, Calif., is already well-established in small and midsize businesses and nonprofits as a tool for creating do-it-yourself dynamic Web sites.
In the last few years, however, it has developed into a popular alternative or supplement to the Java and .Net enterprise application development platform, largely due to its relative simplicity of configuration, lack of licensing fees and ability to run on any operating system.
"As middleware has been growing and maturing on J2EE [Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition], wikis and blogs have been increasingly used by businesses and individuals on their own, using PHP. The more we saw that, the more we recognized PHP as a critical component of this new use of the Web. The content is coming from domain owners and businesses," Smith said.
Thus, these far-flung content creators need ways to make their own custom business applications-and make them quickly, Smith said. PHP, thanks to its drag-and-drop capabilities and minimal need for custom coding, allows for rapid application development and deployment, he said.
"Part of what developers do now in three days, they should be able to do in a few hours," Smith said. "PHP allows for an entirely new software paradigm-one that enables quickly built applications that can serve for a short time, if necessary, and then be discarded or redesigned. There is a growing need for this kind of development."
Stu Nicholas, a member of Smith's work group at IBM, offered a demonstration of what Smith called an "application wiki" built with PHP, a project that is still under internal testing at IBM but holds great promise, Smith said.
"This [application wiki] is all internal to IBM right now; we haven't even had a chance to show it yet to one particular company who asked about this," Smith said. "But I think a lot of other people might be interested in hearing about this."
For the full article please see: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1873538,00.asp
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