Q&A: PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf

By Sharon Machlis

February 4, 2002 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - Rasmus Lerdorf was the original creator of PHP, which has evolved from his personal home page project into an open-source scripting language used worldwide. Lerdorf was interviewed recently via e-mail by Computerworld online managing editor Sharon Machlis.

Q: What would you like corporate IT managers to know about PHP?

A: PHP is not a major investment if they choose to use it. Obviously, being open source, there are no license fees to pay. But more importantly, the learning curve is extremely shallow and it draws on the skills the existing IT staff is likely to already have. PHP is not a new and revolutionary language. It borrows much of its syntax from languages such as C, Perl and Java.

Q: What are the major advantages of PHP? What is it best at?

A: It is a very focused language. It focuses on the Web problem. If you read PHP's excellent online documentation, you will see everything is geared towards solving Web-related problems. It was written by Web developers for Web developers.

PHP is perfectly suited for quickly creating a Web front end to just about any back-end system you can imagine. Typically, the back end would be a database, but it can also be [a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol] directory server, or [Simple Network Management Protocol]-manageable devices, just to name a few. PHP is also good at generating non-HTML dynamic content for the Web such as images, flash or [Portable Document Format] documents. Being able to pull customer information from a database and dynamically generating a professional-looking PDF invoice, for example, is something that is very easy to do in PHP.

Rasmus Lerdorf, inventor of the PHP scripting language

Q: What do you see as its drawbacks? What Web tasks do you think it's less well-suited for?

A: There really aren't any drawbacks when it comes to Web tasks, but I guess that depends a little bit on where you draw the line between Web tasks and back-end tasks associated with the Web. PHP's strength is in the front-end Web interface. As you move more towards the back end, PHP usefulness starts to decrease. For example, you would never write a full back-end database engine in PHP. You also wouldn't write any sort of middle-layer system for a three-tier architecture in PHP.

As the top presentation layer in a three-tier architecture, PHP does just fine.

Q: What's interesting in the works for near-term PHP future developments?

A: Deep in the guts of PHP, the object-oriented program [OOP] is going to be improved a bit. PHP has traditionally been a procedural language, and OOP features have crept in over the years to the point where PHP can be used as a decent OOP language. But there are some things that can be improved with respect to this OOP support.

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