Aaron’s Blog

75 percent of my work is now in PHP

I've had my own business since 2003 but since starting Enjoy Online Ltd in 2007 I've found myself working in PHP most of the time.  There are times when I admire the simplicity of PHP – like when I used to program in classic ASP but to be honest, I count the hours until I can write something in C#.

I know that my knowledge of PHP is limited because I've only been using it since 2006 but I wouldn't use the language out of choice.  In the main, my customers have wanted something in PHP because of some plug-in or server restriction or hosting costs.  I now run have two of my own VPS (one on Windows 2003 and one on Ubuntu) so I have more freedom to push a customer in the .NET direction.  My designer develops in PHP however so to keep my developer busy on larger projects, I have to use PHP.  For smaller projects we can combine the design and development quite nicely with me doing all the development in .NET.

I must admit that .NET has been lagging behind the PHP crowd when it comes to sharing usable plug-ins and scripts.  Quite often although you can get hold of a ready-made control or script it will cost you (or cost you more) when you are using .NET.  When I get the time I will be putting up some of my work that I think would benefit others in the community but in all likelyhood there won't be much PHP script going up because there's already a glut of scripts and posts about pretty much everything you would want to do – or at least most of what I've required as I have been bettering myself.

So the reason for this post?  Basically I am hoping that in 2-3 months I can turn around and say "I do 75% of my work in .NET", or that in 2-3 months it won't be a day that I've come home and cursed other developers for their crazy coding in PHP.

Tags: to PHP or not to PHP