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Not a developer, but a low level IT manager in a top 50 Fortune 500 company: for my area I chose to use almost plain PHP and jQuery and a few tools for our inte

Not a developer, but a low level IT manager in a top 50 Fortune 500 company: for my area I chose to use almost plain PHP and jQuery and a few tools for our internal use apps, not the latest, shiniest tech available for 3 days. Finding developers with real expertise, being able to support the applications 5 or more years, having stuff that simply works is much more important than using the obscure or temporary in fashion technology of the day. Yes, there are so many options and there are so few that meet the criteria...

akie 8y ago
I’m sorry, but you’re 5 to 10 years behind the times, and I say that as a non-bandwagon-jumping old guy. Plain PHP these days is almost always a mistake, there are new (and proven, stable) tools that provide significant benefits without any real downsides.
- AdrianB1 8y ago
  Can you please provide a few examples? Just curious how it can be simpler and cheaper to build and maintain when performance is more than enough, usability is great and the end results are exceeding all expectations. Other than being out of fashion, what is wrong with things that simply work?
  - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
    Because it’s not about the end product. It’s about developers. It’s resume driven development. Sadly, devs have to do this otherwise other dev managers won’t hire them for being out of date. It’s a vicious, pathetic cycle.
  - andrewmackrodt 8y ago
    I think plain PHP may have been taken to mean you're using an in house framework without using a package manager such as composer. In this case it's definitely more expensive to roll your own solution, especially when it comes to maintenance and onboarding.
    - AdrianB1 8y ago
      Composer is included in the "tools" category, of course. There are other tools used (ex: webpack, grunt, git and more), but I am looking at the stack (PHP + SQL) as the primary components on topic for this discussion. What I am not including are niche or fancy components that bring little or no value, add complexity or limits the availability of developers or long time support. We are also not writing code in Notepad (Windows shop by other people's choice, no comment), so it's not stone age. We used in the past libraries that were abandoned, technologies that were big hypes for a year or two and disappeared, etc. In the corporate world you don't have one product with millions of users, you have tens of small apps that have thousands of users. Some are so simple I can write myself using existing (internal library of) components in a few days using basic stuff like Bootstrap (good enough), jQuery, Vue (nice one) and very carefully written SQL code (that is where volume and complexity exists). Again, I am no developer myself, but I can write code when needed at least as good as the developers that I have from multiple suppliers. In the end is cost versus benefits. We are very good at calculating both and in many cases the bean counting tells me to continue doing what we do.
  - akie 8y ago
    Sure. This is assuming you are starting a new project, for existing projects the cost-benefit analysis is different. When you're starting a new project in PHP, there's almost no reason to start from anything else than Laravel or Symfony. These are powerful, well-written, performative frameworks that give you a lot of the plumbing (routing, caching, database, ...) of your app for free, and that allow you to focus on just implementing what you need to implement. Additionally, you will find that other people (third parties) have written code that integrates with these frameworks, and this allows you to re-use their code instead of writing your own. Finally, in terms of maintenance, it will be easier to hand over the application to new developers, because they might be familiar with either Laravel or Symfony.
orf 8y ago
It just sounds like you are justifying your lack of knowledge about the last 15 years of improvements in your chosen profession with a bunch of "these-damn-kids-on-my-lawn" style hyperbole. More fool you (and your employer) I guess.

akie 8y ago

I’m sorry, but you’re 5 to 10 years behind the times, and I say that as a non-bandwagon-jumping old guy. Plain PHP these days is almost always a mistake, there are new (and proven, stable) tools that provide significant benefits without any real downsides.

AdrianB1 8y ago
Can you please provide a few examples? Just curious how it can be simpler and cheaper to build and maintain when performance is more than enough, usability is great and the end results are exceeding all expectations. Other than being out of fashion, what is wrong with things that simply work?
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  Because it’s not about the end product. It’s about developers. It’s resume driven development. Sadly, devs have to do this otherwise other dev managers won’t hire them for being out of date. It’s a vicious, pathetic cycle.
- andrewmackrodt 8y ago
  I think plain PHP may have been taken to mean you're using an in house framework without using a package manager such as composer. In this case it's definitely more expensive to roll your own solution, especially when it comes to maintenance and onboarding.
  - AdrianB1 8y ago
    Composer is included in the "tools" category, of course. There are other tools used (ex: webpack, grunt, git and more), but I am looking at the stack (PHP + SQL) as the primary components on topic for this discussion. What I am not including are niche or fancy components that bring little or no value, add complexity or limits the availability of developers or long time support. We are also not writing code in Notepad (Windows shop by other people's choice, no comment), so it's not stone age. We used in the past libraries that were abandoned, technologies that were big hypes for a year or two and disappeared, etc. In the corporate world you don't have one product with millions of users, you have tens of small apps that have thousands of users. Some are so simple I can write myself using existing (internal library of) components in a few days using basic stuff like Bootstrap (good enough), jQuery, Vue (nice one) and very carefully written SQL code (that is where volume and complexity exists). Again, I am no developer myself, but I can write code when needed at least as good as the developers that I have from multiple suppliers. In the end is cost versus benefits. We are very good at calculating both and in many cases the bean counting tells me to continue doing what we do.
- akie 8y ago
  Sure. This is assuming you are starting a new project, for existing projects the cost-benefit analysis is different. When you're starting a new project in PHP, there's almost no reason to start from anything else than Laravel or Symfony. These are powerful, well-written, performative frameworks that give you a lot of the plumbing (routing, caching, database, ...) of your app for free, and that allow you to focus on just implementing what you need to implement. Additionally, you will find that other people (third parties) have written code that integrates with these frameworks, and this allows you to re-use their code instead of writing your own. Finally, in terms of maintenance, it will be easier to hand over the application to new developers, because they might be familiar with either Laravel or Symfony.

orf 8y ago

It just sounds like you are justifying your lack of knowledge about the last 15 years of improvements in your chosen profession with a bunch of "these-damn-kids-on-my-lawn" style hyperbole. More fool you (and your employer) I guess.