Marco Tabini is asking for real life case studies for PHP in enterprise. I don’t have anything to offer for publication, but I do have a little story.
When I was doing user interface design for a web-based application at a large software company a few years back, I started using PHP for my UI prototyping for several reasons:
- It allowed me to maintain a single shell template so that I didn’t have to update 20 or 30 files whenever a visual change was made.
- I could hook up controls so that I could really walk people through several pages a scenario (though at the time, I generally used canned data for each page instead of passing the entered data around).
The software was written in J2EE, but because I could churn out new screens so quickly in this environment, it wasn’t long before people started asking about the feasibility of actually hooking up my PHP UI to the backend databases.
We never actually did hook them up to the databases, but while the next generation version of the software was still being completed, my PHP screens were used to show how the app would work.
I used the same technique at future places of employment with similar success.