Quan Guoqing, a bachelor's degree graduate from Henan University of Science and Technology, has more than 5 years of PHP software project development experience. Currently working at Zhengzhou Jinqing Electronic Technology Co., Ltd., leading a team to participate in the development of Zhengzhou local O2O electronic business (card discounts, Jiuding group purchase, Jiuding mall) and other commercial projects as well as various online payments ( Alipay , mobile phone payment, UnionPay online payment,) and TTG (U Life), WeChat interface, refund function, etc. Currently responsible for the program design of projects such as WAP stations and new versions of websites (coupons or card discounts). PHP5.5 was released a few months ago, and Google began to support PHP. Various actions once again heralded the advent of the golden age of PHP! Recently, we contacted him by email and asked him to talk about the current situation and prospects of PHP development. The following is the original text of the communication letter:
What did you find most difficult when you first started programming?
I started to have more contact with computers when I was in high school. When I was in college, I naturally chose to major in network technology, and I was more interested in this aspect. So after graduation, I insisted on becoming a programmer and working in software development. After graduation, I did an internship in Xi'an Software Park for a period of time. At the end of the internship, I encountered the global financial crisis in 2008. I did not find an ideal job, but only engaged in computer-related work. Later, when I had an opportunity, I went to Wuxi (National) Software Park for practical training. I had another technical training and a more systematic study of related technologies. After that, I officially started development and participated in Wuxi June Intelligent Software Co., Ltd. PRPC European and American banking software development. I think that period was probably the most difficult. It was not very tiring, but my mood was always swinging and I couldn't settle down. It was completely different from thinking about problems when working on projects now.
How did you start paying attention to PHP? What was the first PHP project you developed? What is your most satisfying PHP project?
In the earliest days, I was actually working as a web designer in a company. The company happened to be short of PHP programmers at that time. I had also done Java development before, so I switched to PHP and started working as a PHPer. It was also from that time that I started to delve into php. The first PHP project was the "Global Brand Search Network", but this project was not the first to go online. The "Iwagu Auto Parts Wheel Network" that I later participated in went online earlier than the project I just mentioned. What I am most satisfied with is the current project "Card Card Discount". This project is mainly a project that cooperates with TTG to provide discounts for swiping UnionPay cards. After all, I am becoming more and more mature in technology, and my ideas are much better than those a few years ago.
The three development languages PHP, Python and Ruby appeared almost at the same time. They are all very distinctive and excellent open source languages. According to the language rankings released by the TIOBE programming language community this month, PHP has gained rapid momentum and risen to fifth place. It is obvious that PHP has a better development momentum than the other two languages. Do you think this is related to PHP's foothold in website development and the PHP language? What does its own characteristics matter? Or are there any other factors affecting it?
The above three languages are all excellent scripting languages. Now more and more new companies or new projects use PHP, which makes PHP-related communities more and more active, which in turn affects many projects or companies. choices, forming a virtuous cycle. As far as I know so far, PHP is the first choice for most domestic web projects, and many companies have switched to PHP from other languages (such as ASP, JAVA). The right one is the best. PHP is fast, has low development costs, short cycles, low post-maintenance costs, and rich open source products (this can affect the decisions of many projects). These are incomparable to the other two languages. In addition, many large projects seem to be moving in a different development direction from PHP, let us wait and see.
Are you satisfied with the current status of PHP development tools? What development tools are used by the team you currently work on?
Personally, I believe that an excellent framework can improve work efficiency to a great extent, especially for large and medium-sized projects. Of course, if you have enough control over the project, a framework is not necessary. After all, PHP frameworks are different from ROR. They are numerous and confusing, and it takes time to learn a framework. As mentioned in your question, many old PHP programmers dismiss frameworks and think that they have enough control over the project and do not need such a cumbersome thing as a framework. However, in the long run, an excellent framework It can extend the life of a project and reduce the cost of maintenance and secondary development. It is difficult to imagine a project without an excellent framework. There are currently many mainstream PHP frameworks, but no framework is completely suitable for a large-scale project. The current development team is using the ZEND framework, which has greatly improved the team's work efficiency.
There is a lot of news about PHP website vulnerabilities. Do you think the reason for this is related to the characteristics of the PHP language itself (compared to other factors such as the number of PHP websites, PHP code writing habits, etc.)? Is there room for improvement in PHP security?
When I first started developing, I actually didn’t like using open source frameworks very much. I felt that the class library files I wrote could be called everywhere, which was very convenient to use. In fact, it was because I was too low-level at that time. Later, I started to come into contact with frameworks such as zend, tp, and yii. By learning simple usage, I found that it can save time and have greater flexibility. Programmers can have clear classifications and reduce the amount of code. At present, website security has always been a cumbersome issue. It mainly involves server security, network security and code quality. I don't want to say that PHP is an unsafe language. Currently, PHP has many excellent open source products, such as ZEND, TP, YII, etc. Even if they are open source, these products ensure sufficient security. The threshold for PHP is very low, and beginners can get started in one or two months. However, these "quick start" programmers tend to ignore code quality and safety issues. The improvement of security issues largely depends on how more and more PHP programmers pay attention to this issue, thereby enhancing the quality of the code.
Finally, talk about your views on the future development of PHP (good things and things that still need improvement).
No matter what kind of language, object-oriented is more of a way of thinking about problems. There is no need to be object-oriented for the sake of object-oriented. PHP's original object orientation can be simply regarded as an upgrade of functions. It was once made fun of by many developers of other languages, but PHP5's object orientation is enough to satisfy most WEB projects. If a language wants to survive, it must adapt to the trend of technological development and constantly make adjustments. In this regard, the PHP team is full of vitality and believes that there is considerable room for future development.
In recent years, I have been mainly involved in the development of PHP object-oriented Web projects. The current framework of the PHP language mainly adopts the MVC development model similar to JAVA, contains a rich development library, and supports multiple databases drivers. The future PHP development framework also needs to have several characteristics:
Adopt more new features of PHP, such as namespaces and anonymous functions;
Have richer and extensible development packages;
Extensive documentation;
The community is active. When choosing, every PHP developer should choose the most suitable development framework according to his or her own situation, so as to carry out project development conveniently and quickly, improve work efficiency, save time, and reduce cost accounting.
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