Monday, July 26, 2010

Qualities of a Professional PHP Web Developer

PHP is extremely popular among the web development community. Many prefer their dream project developed in PHP. It is server side scripting so helpful in the development of dynamic pages. Searching a PHP developer is easy task but selecting a professional PHP web developer is somewhat difficult. If we consider following points during the selection of PHP developer we can make a success.

PHP developer must be sound theoretically as well as practically in PHP development and you can identify this by asking the differences between PHP 4 and PHP 5. He should know at least three major features that separate PHP5 from PHP4.

Today the website development scenario says there are applications or websites which are not developed only in PHP but a developer should know other languages. If developer does not have mastery in other languages, he should have minimum knowledge that how to integrate them in PHP. For instance he should know HTML, CSS, Flash, etc.

Developer should have enough understanding of Object Oriented Programming. He should be able to answer simple question on OOP like how private and protected methods differ. He should have following concepts clear in his mind.

· Interfaces

· Constructors

· private, public, protected

· Inheritance

· Polymorphism

· static methods

He should have knowledge regarding majority of databases. He should have understanding of primary and foreign keys. He should at least know what a normalized database is. He should know some design patterns. PHP Programmer should have understanding of it and its importance. He must know why they are helpful. He must know at least one major source control system. He should know the importance of CVS.

He should know what unit testing is, and why it is important for a project. He should know about test driven design, knowing how to unit test JavaScript, or how to use selenium. He should know the methods use to manipulate the DOM like appendChild, removeChild, nextSibling, etc. He should know how to create classes in JavaScript. He should know how to make a private variable in JavaScript.

He should know the box model inside out; understand CSS selectors and how to use inheritance. He must be a part of community so he can take help of others whenever in need. He must have burning desire to learn more and more. He must be good in communication so that he can handle clients easily. He must have passion for team work so he can do anything with any team.

For more information regarding PHP Development please visit us at http://www.indianic.com/php-development-services.html.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Select PHP for Web Application Development

You might have decided building a great web application for your dream project. You are clear in your idea that what you want. Now developer is asking you for the language selection. There are unparalleled expansions of the field of web application development and you can develop your website in numerous scripting languages like Cold Fusion, Perl, JSP, ASP.NET, PHP etc. Then you have to make choice for language. At such moment you consider one fact that over 40% websites or web applications are found successfully running in PHP on the internet. There are over 20 million websites and over 1 million web servers running PHP and those numbers are growing every day.

First, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote the PHP script as a series of Perl script, which he used to track visitors to his personal webpage. He wanted to see that who was viewing his resume on his home page. After that he rewrote PHP as a scripting engine and added support for forms. After 1994 PHP evolved as an opensource and a huge community and followers have developed. Over the years the Personal Home Page acronym was dropped and it evolved into the PHP Hypertext Preprocessor.

Basically php web application development is created to develop dynamic web page so its execution is fast on website. The PHP code can directly be inserted into the HTML. Time for Process and loading is very quick. When visitor comes to the web page code is executed fast. PHP is a server side scripting so user does not need any special plug-in to see the PHP in action, it needs browser only.

PHP for web application development is opensource means it releases under PHP license and this license is compatible with the GNU or GPL. This makes PHP free software and you can download PHP source code 100% free. This way you can save your initial investment and start project quickly. Being an opensource PHP has a huge community and this community is willing to share so you can obtain support in form of code library, advice, guidance and a lot more. Likewise, you can share your developed code with others and can oblige them. Thus, community offers technical support and regular updates.

The great thing for php development is its simplicity. It is easy to learn and understand. Its syntax is somewhat similar to C and Perl. You can learn PHP if you are familiar with C, JavaScript or HTML. Due to easiness in learning it has a huge community. Besides, PHP can run on any platform be it UNIX, Macs or Windows version it operate equally well on them.

PHP for web application development is server side language so it doesn’t use a lot of system resources and run fast so you never experience slow processes with PHP. In web hosting industry PHP typically uses an Apache module, which is written in C and it loads and executes fast. You can integrate PHP with other opensource software with ease like WordPress, Joomla, Magento, etc. and create robust web application or website. PHP is old enough so it is a stable language. You can create bug free applications with PHP MySQL Development. You can assure security of your application with PHP since it has many properties which deal with security issues. Security levels can be adjusted in the .ini file.

PHP for web application development has lots of extensions, server interfaces, database interfaces and other modules available. In case of server interfaces PHP can load into Apache, IIS, Roxen, THTTPD and AOLserver. Database interfaces are available for MySQL, MS SQL, Informix, Oracle and plenty of others. In case database is not supported at all then ODBC is an option.