You may have guessed my PHP development philosophy from something I wrote recently, but an interesting question at work yesterday showed that I need to put it in words.
If there is something difficult to do in PHP, there is probably an extension somewhere that allows PHP to push it to another layer. If that is something that can’t be pushed to another layer, than PHP probably has a built-in function or best practice to handle that case. Find that extension, function, or best practice and never choose one where another is better.
At work, the problem was, “Well if we weren’t so big, I’d have done all this on the database, which probably means that PHP shouldn’t be solving this problem.” In other words, if the scale was small, the database, not PHP, would have been the obvious place to solve the problem we were having. But the scale we operate is too large for a database so it becomes a problem. A solution to the problem on this scale written in PHP would not be a good architecture decision. (I’d pay for it down the road.)
That explains the first part of my philosophy, but what about the second?
[autoload, quirks, and session serialization after the jump]Continue reading
