Correct ways to build a house, to manufacture screens of certain resolutions or fitted sizes for the clothes we wear, correct ways of measurement - these are all standards that are everywhere around us. In the case of PHP, the standards are represented by the PSR specifications. We want to invite standards into the world of PHP, so that we can better understand the ecosystem around the PHP language and its future evolution.

PHP has a shaky history as far as package management goes. All this was about to change in the first part of the year 2012, when the Composer and Packagist were launched. In this article, we will explore the beautiful world and history of modern package management in PHP.

In the first week of December I had the pleasure to attend, together with my team, one of the biggest and most important PHP conferences of the year: SymfonyCon 2015. It was held in Paris and it marked the celebration of 10 years since the Symfony framework project started.

The PHP language started as a simple collection of C binaries used for maintaining a simple web page. Today, PHP runs on millions of webservers and is ranked very high on the list of the most popular programming languages in the world . Its most intense growth of popularity happened in the first half of the 2000s, followed by an accelerated development and maturing process of tools and frameworks of this ecosystem.

This article is strongly connected with the one about the HipHop virtual machine, published in the issue nr. 21 of this magazine. When Mark Zuckerberg wrote the first source code lines for Facebook, he had to choose a programming language in which to develop his new social networking site. He chose PHP because, as we all know, it has a very fast feedback loop: you make a change, save the file, press F5 in your browser and you can instantly see the effect. This is possible because the programmer doesn’t have to go through any compilation step. Another reason is that PHP is dynamic: it doesn’t ask for explicit types for the variables within the code.

If you’re reading this, you’re most likely a programmer. And, like any programmer, you had to search for programming questions online. I’m sure you noticed something interesting: in the last few years, when we search for a programming question online, a link to StackOverflow will usually be somewhere among the first 3 results from Google. This is no coincidence: StackOverflow has somehow entered the live of programmers, slowly but surely. We use it practically every day, but I noticed that most programmers don’t know too much about how this site was born, what principles it works on and why it’s so successful.

These days, when it comes to huge popular websites, performance issues come up often along with the question: „How can we support such a huge userbase at a reasonable price ?”. Facebook, one of the largest websites on the planet, seems to have a pretty good answer to this: the HipHop virtual machine. What is this, how was it born, how does it work and why is it better than the alternatives ? I will try to answer all these questions in the following pages.