Matt Stauffer has posted the second article in his "Enterprise Laravel" series to his site. In part one he started with a practical approach to seeing how large the codebase is (counting lines). In this new post he takes an example situation (gathered from conversations with other developers) and shows how Laravel can fit its "enterprise" level needs.

Recently, I grew tired of hearing people say, "Laravel is fine for small apps, but when you are working in the Enterprise..." You can almost hear the capital E in enterprise, like they're talking about the starship.

I've spent the last few months trying to gather information about what makes people say this, and also stories of folks who are already successfully working with Laravel in enterprise context. I put out a <a href="https://enterpriselaravel.com/success-stories-survey>survey to collect stories, and wrote and delivered a talk (which I hope to give again soon) titled "Laravel and the Enterprise."

The idea, stemming from a submission via his "help me" form, is an application that lets customers create their own white-label storefronts for clothing. He starts with the submission itself and the issues it points out including:

• the load caused by adding a new tenant (requires more servers)
• a messy codebase
• a more "monolithic" approach as it evolved away from simple CRUD

He then goes through each of the (five) points made and his responses trying to help mitigate the issue. Some of them come with more technical recommendations but for others the answer is more about documentation and processes.

On the Laravel Daily site there's a post that looks to answer a question often posed about any framework but, in this case, about Laravel - can Laravel be used for big enterprise apps?

Yesterday I’ve listened to a new Laravel Podcast episode with Taylor Otwell, Jeffrey Way and Matt Stauffer – and they (finally) talked about creating big apps with Laravel, lately this question is asked a lot by everyone. So is Laravel “fit” or “mature enough” for big projects? Since the podcast guys don’t provide a transcript, and listening to 50 minutes can be an overkill, I decided to write a summary, quoting the conversation and dividing the answers into more readable format like Q&A and bullet points, also relevant links. So, let’s dive in!

The post is then divided up into a few of the topics involved in Laravel being used for larger applications:

• What is a big app?
• So can Laravel be used for big apps?
• People are irrational
• Enterprise world
• Any examples of big Laravel apps?
• It’s not about the framework
• Ok, so how to build big apps?

For each point there's a comment from the episode with their own response (sometimes more than one, just depending on the subject).

On the Toptal.com site author Donald Mudenge has written up a post that wants to help debunk the top 5 WordPress myths that are still floating around about this popular and common tool.

In the early days, people used WordPress only as a blogging tool. However, today WordPress covers more than 50 percent of the market share for CMSs, supporting nearly 60 million websites worldwide.

As a commonly used platform for building websites and other online applications, misconceptions have spread like a forest fire, keeping people away from WordPress. In this article, I outline and explain the five most common WordPress taboos and myths, clarify them and offer solutions on how to overcome them.

The five myths he tries to dispel are:

• WordPress is significantly more likely to be hacked.
• WordPress is just blogging software.
• WordPress professionals are designers.
• WordPress isn’t an enterprise solution.
• One WordPress requires one database.

For each item on the list he includes a brief summary of what's usually said about the myth and corrects it with his own description and links to other resources helping to prove his point.

Remi Collet has a new post today talking about the next major release of the PHP language - PHP 7 - and how it, in its current state, can be installed now as an RPM from the "remi" repository as a software collection.

RPM of upcoming major version of PHP 7.0, are available in remi repository for Fedora 20, 21, 22 and Enterprise Linux 6, 7 (RHEL, CentOS, ...) in a fresh new Software Collection (php70) allowing its installation beside the system version. As I strongly believe in SCL potential to provide a simple way to allow installation of various versions simultaneously, and as I think it is useful to offer this feature to allow developers to test their applications, to allow sysadmin to prepare a migration or simply to use this version for some specific application, I decide to create this new SCL.

Instructions for the installation (via yum) are included and a list of some things "to be noticed" about the setup are also included.

Kevin Schroeder has an interesting post to his site about how Google is finally acknowledging PHP exists and how it's "exploding on Google App Engine"...but it's only happening just now.

How is it that one of the most despised programming languages in the word is running (as Google claims) up to 75% of the web? Many nay-sayers will say “oh it’s just WordPress” or “oh, it’s just PHPbb”. But in doing that they are completely missing the point. [...] In the article Venture Beat says “PHP is moving to the Enterprise very quickly”. This is not true. PHP IS in the enterprise and has been for a long time. People just either don’t know it or refused to admit it.

He talks about the things that PHP does, including something interesting - it exposes the focus on the theoretical (the "ivory tower" as he puts it) and puts the focus back on the practical, real-life world of just getting things done. He suggests that Google's reasoning behind taking so long to get PHP up and running on the App Engine was just someone with "their blinders on" to the world of the practical that PHP fills so well.

On NetTuts.com Jonathan Cutrell has posted some ideas for you to consider when designing your enterprise-level applications, regardless of the language(s) they're written in.

Organization can make or break the maintainability of an application. With smaller applications, organization is more obviously apparent; however, as the application grows and as the number of application developers and front-end engineers producing code increases, the more confusing organization can become. In this post, we will go over some basic concepts for keeping applications organized so that finding relevant code is an efficient and systematic process.

He's broken it up into a list of suggestions to make it a bit easier to take it all in:

• Learn from Frameworks
• Building a Standard
• Uniformity of Connected Parts, Uniqueness of Discrete Parts
• Another Note About Static Files
• What Should Be Unique?

There's some good advice in there, especially around things like standards, naming conventions, site complexity and how much usage the site is likely to see.

Johannes Schlüter has a new post to his blog today mentioning the beta release of the mysqlnd_ms plugin (previously mentioned by Ulf Wendel and a new feature that can be plugged into the MySQL Enterprise Monitor to make the Query Analyzer directly use PHP instead.

When running a PHP-based application with MySQL it is often quite interesting to see what actually happens on the database sever. Besides monitoring of the system load etc. it is often interesting to see what queries are actually executed and which of them are expensive. A part of MySQL Enterprise Monitor is the MySQL Query Analyzer which helps answering these questions.

This was handled via a proxy that sat between the database and app server and ran through the queries looking for improvements. This new plugin keeps it closer to PHP itself without having to hit against the proxy. You can see the result in these two screenshots from inside the Manager application. You also have the side benefit of getting a stack trace of it running through the app to help you identify the spots most needing improvement in the code too.

New on the Ibuildings techPortal site, there's an article from Rupert Jones that walks you through the installation of Magento Enterprise on a linux-based platform (LAMP).

Magento is an increasingly popular e-commerce platform due to its sheer flexibility, wide range of features and the facility to customise it relatively easily. In this post we will examine how to get Magento Enterprise set up and running. We assume a debian-based LAMP stack but these instructions could be adapted for any other platform as required.

He shows you how to install ionCube first (a requirement for Magento) and how to get the latest Magento package, unpack it and set up some permissions so the application can write to things correctly. From there it's a simple database creation and Apache config away from being setup and working.

On DZone.com today Giorgio Sironi offers some of his opinions on web applications as enterprise software.

In this article we'll focus on a case study on enterprise software where the porting failed, to list the issues of introducing a web application into the enterprise, and hopefully pave the way for future successes. This is kind of a written retrospective.

He briefly touches on some of the advantages first, mentioning the portability they offer and the fact that it's an "automatic upgrade" for users without having to install additional software. He also talks about a case study of an application that failed but also covers things learned along the way like:

• How complex the domain the application lives in could be (enterprise needs from enterprise software)
• Worries about data portability
• Struggles with the limitations of the browser (like working with large file downloads)
• and, of course, the huge amount of requirements that come with the application just because of the needs of the company

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new article looking at how you can build an enterprise-grade stack with the combination of Zend Server and Oracle's 11g database.

Setting up an Oracle/PHP/Apache/Linux (OPAL) development environment isn't the easiest of tasks, especially in corporate IT environments which are used to point-and-click simplicity. [...] One of the easiest ways to quickly configure a PHP environment in this environment is Zend Server, a PHP stack that runs on both Windows and Linux and that can be used to build Oracle-based applications out of the box.

The article introduces Zend Server and the functionality it provides (like a web-based management console, built-in optimization and application troubleshooting) as well as how to get it installed and working on your system. With everything all set up and ready, they show you how to configure the Oracle support for it including the use of connection pooling page caching.