Now before I start getting hate mail, let me explain that I still think there is a market for PHP frameworks. I think if you have a moderately low traffic site that's going to live on shared hosting, and is basically a CRUD application on top of MySQL, disregard this article, it probably isn't for you. However, I've seen so many projects start out with that scope. They either grow or the developer/client wants to add more fancy new features they are starting to see elsewhere on the web. Then I see all these PHP developers hacking things that the PHP stack really isn't meant to do.

He takes some of the core features of several of the popular frameworks out there and breaks them out into a list of technologies that do that work themselves (such as "Web Server", "Dependency Management", "Caching" and "Messaging"). He points to a Java/Scala framework, Play as an example of having several of these technologies built-in where you don't have to have a whole other set of skills to use them effectively. It's an interesting idea but seems a little NIH to me.

PHP came a long way, and we are no longer the cool new kid on the block. On the other hand side we are still far away from being the new cobol, and there is a lot of great stuff going on inside php and the php community. What happened to PHP the last few years, what is happening right now and what will be the next 5 years? Is PHP ready for nowadays trends? Does it fit for Social Web, NoSQL and HTML 5? Should You better be learning Scala right now?

The video runs about 45 minutes and compares some of the features Scala offers, a brief history of PHP, some of the trends of current development and where PHP needs to go in the future to keep up with trends.

Before going on with the points, let me state something: please avoid flame wars, all the Scala vs. PHP stuff, fanboyism and what not. This post is not about that. Regarding Wade Arnold I have to say that I fully respect him. While I don't know him personally, I know him for his work on AMFPHP, since it was a platform I used to work with before.

Alvaro talks about functional programming and some of the main points he had made about Erlang in a talk he had given - code reload, being ready for multi-core and no shared state between scripts. He talks about how these (really) apply to PHP.

I still believe that PHP is the best language for the web for the majority of programmers; it quite possibly has the best documentation and examples of any language like a DSL for the web! [...] So why is Scala easier?

The first reason he suggests is that Scala, unlike PHP makes it simpler to handle concurrency issues and makes it to where partial functions and mutable/immutable types all play well together. He compares some of the skills a PHP developer might have to have to reproduce the features that Scala comes built in with (a "resume" of 13 lines as compared to one with 5).

It really is a grind to overcome that first 4-6 months but if you need scale I would recommend taking the haul. It will change how you think about problems forever.

So what do I exactly need? I want to build multiple versions of PHP from the same branch without checking out the code twice. I also want to configure these builds somewhere without always typing in the parameter list or so. For further versions I want to be able to configure these in a file that can easily be distributed to other machines.

He includes the basic Scala script to make the build process work - defining the locations of the build tools, setting up a few parameters and define a few build parameters for his PHP6, PHP6-debug, PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.3-debug installations. An example of running the script is also given, passing in the name of the script along with the target to the java VM (or tell it to build all instances). You can download the jar file here.

PHP 5.3, along with many other features, introduced closures. So now we can finally do all the cool stuff that Ruby / Groovy / Scala / any_modern_language guys can do, right? Well, we can, but we probably won't... Here's why.

He compares the PHP syntax for using closures/lambda functions with the abilities of Groovy and Scala. He does point out out that the ArrayObject wrapper does allow you to work a bit more fluently with the array's contents, but it's still not quite the same. According to him:

I'm sure closures will find their uses in the PHP world (like delayed execution or automated resource management), but IMHO replacing traditional loops and array operations is not one of them.