TL;DR - PHP is still a useful tool, but as a PHP developer, have you started playing with other useful tools? Here’s my story. Today Jeff Atwood’s new piece "The PHP Singularity" and Marco Arment’s "PHP Addiction" have started another round of heated discussion on PHP. As someone who started his career as a PHP developer, I feel like sharing my thoughts from a different perspective. I began my career as a freelancer - since JavaScript and PHP were the two programming languages I learnt at scho...

Today an interesting blog post on Zend Framework has made to the Hacker News front page. I have to agree with the author - Zend Framework is an over-engineered piece of software. A few years ago I was working full time as a PHP developer. Naturally, I had experimented with lots of frameworks, including CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Kohana, Yii, Symfony and obviously, Zend Framework. Over the years, I had developed many projects primarily using CodeIgniter and later on, Kohana. There was one project tha...

Similarly to Action Throttler for Rails, KThrottler is an easy to use Kohana module to quickly throttle application actions based on configurable duration and limit. Go check out the code now! :)

A few days ago I discovered Padrino, an excellent ruby framework built on top of Sinatra. What can be a better than experimenting with it? Build an actual website with it! So last night I ported Wuit.com from using vanilla PHP + Flourish to using Padrino + DataMapper + Haml. The entire porting experience was positive, albeit the website only has two pages. I did encounter a strange problem with Capistrano though - both current_release and latest_release were giving me strange results. In the e...

Haml and Sass are two extremely useful template engines. They are very popular amongst the Ruby and Rails community. I am happy to release a module for Kohana v3 that uses the PHamlP library to offer Haml/Sass support for Kohana. Right now the module only supports Haml but I will be adding Sass support in the very near future. Head over to GitHub to check out the source code. :)

The Rails deployment flow is really smooth thanks to the powerful (and easy to use) Capistrano. Capistrano not only works with Rails and other Ruby code bases, but also code bases in any programming languages, such as PHP! Here is an overview of what I did to get one of our PHP production sites up and running with Capistrano. If you don’t already have Ruby and Rubygems installed, install them! After you got ruby and rubygems, install Capistrano and its related gems - gem install capistra...