The Developer Day | Staying Curious

TAG | oss

Nov/08

12

Who is Pablo Picasso in PHP?

I’ve been developing web applications for quite a while now. And overs years it became as a form of art for me. Creating maintainable, performant, scalable, secure and highly available web applications trully requires a lot of knowledge and experience.

It’s easy to say some applications are better than others. Like paintings or music. Some are masterpieces and some are just a pile of crap. Maybe it’s just me but I think that it’s easy to learn what *good* music is, who the *greatest* painters are and see their work and learn something. So I dare to ask the question. Is it the same with web development?

And if you think what i’m thinking you are thinking then … Yes there are open source web projects! And yes some of them are great! But what kind of projects are these projects really?

There’s phpBB. The famous php forum. It’s crap inside. And there’s phpMyAdmin .. it’s also a view of art that you want to wash your eyes with a bleech after. Even though I use it everyday. OK I’m choosing bad examples here. Lets take … WordPress? Well it’s better .. But really? It’s still not a master piece. You can learn more than from others but still not much. And then there are content management systems like Drupal and others which also creeps me out. And finally iI see frameworks. I personally love the ZendFramework. I think it’s one of the greatest things that happened to PHP in recent years. But it’s a framework! You can’t find there any working models, controllers, web services and such. Ofcourse you can find a lot of *other stuff * there  to learn from (like how to create libraries, components or frameworks).

Yes there are great books, blogs, conferences, your company projects. It adds up. But I want to find out who is Pablo Picasso in PHP. I want to see his work and say to myself .. “God! He’s a genius! I love it! It’s so simple and elegant. Why didn’t I do it the same way before?” I think it is healthy for one to evaluate himself among the best and see how far the road he is.

What do you think?

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