PHP, a mystery success story!

Description

PHP, what a mystery success story! It seems to do everything wrong. Still everybody uses it for a personal blog, the neighborhood store website or even the Fortune 500 gorilla of web portals.

What are we all thinking betting our time and money on PHP!?! But maybe because, and not in-spite of all of this, PHP is still at the very front of the internet technology stack. This is an attempt to unravel part of the mystery and an invitation to become part of this magic.

Lukas Smith is a well known contributor to the PEAR and PHP project. He labels himself the "personal secretary of all PHP release managers" maintaining the unofficial official release wiki for the PHP project. He is also active in the database community, particular inside the MySQL and PostgreSQL community. As a result he was a founding member of the Open Source Database Consortium. He has given talks at various international conferences and published articles in print magazines. He also frequently does tech reviews for numerous book publishers. He is employed at Liip.ch, a company focused on providing state of the art web based solutions for clients looking for pushing the limits.