Re: Question on business want for PHP

I'm going to have to start looking for that *perfect* college job I guess.

I was very fortunate last year at my high school because I was given the 
  opportunity to build a curriculum backbone for the school in PHP.  It 
all started because one of our classes was wasting lots of $$ on 
BlackBoard5 (some of you may be familiar with it) and I tried explaining 
to the people at our school that there were free *better* solutions. 
After complaining, argueing, fighting, and rioting they let me show them 
some of what was out there.  To make a long story short, or quasi, they 
eventually gave me a class period during the day to work with a friend 
on piecing software together.  As of current they have a CMS designed to 
administer web pages for all the classes and departments in the building 
and facilitate it across students and teachers, an online gradebook, and 
a messageing system for class debate.  They eventually offered us some 
money for the work, and I'm hoping I can develop something from there, 
but we'll see.

The worst part of the battle was not letting me use PHP, but letting me 
touch their server, a clunky Win NT 4.0 IIS 4.0 machine.  (Yuck!  @ 233 
Mhz with 256 Ram too!)  We now, fortunatley, have a dual Xeon 2.0 Ghz 
machine with 3 GB Ram, although it still has Win NT 4.0 (breaks my 
heart), and they're exploring Apache (thank God)

Anyhow, that's the job I'm looking for, and that's why I posed the 
question.  Unfortunatley I doubt if this is going to work.

Zend was especially nice to me and provided me with a couple of copies 
of ZDS for working with the school.  Hopefully my friend and I have 
given PHP a good imprint in the K-12 area here.  We're hoping that some 
day the economy will pick up and schools will explore the solutions 
we've pieced together.

For now, though, I'll be forced to stick to my personal web site.  :-)

- Stan

Jonathan Villa wrote:

> Totally agree with you Hans...
> 
> That is one of the "points" which is thrown against me when I bring up
> PHP.  I'm glad that PHP has such a large user base, but it also hurts
> PHP.  I've tried to walk a few .NET developers through my code showing
> that not all code is rushed together and shaky.
> 
> 
> On Sun, 2003-07-20 at 21:54, Hans Zaunere wrote:
> 
>>>I wholeheartedly agree. With prior experiance in Perl, C, and shell 
>>>scripts, PHP was a breeze. I had only to look up a few functions. The
>>
>>Just to chime in a bit.
>>
>>While PHP is generally easy to code with, this isn't always a good thing.  I see time and time again people who write very sloppy and insecure PHP code; IMHO, PHP is a bit too forgiving.
>>
>>Coding PHP is easy; writing PHP takes a little more, and if developers would try to raise the bar a bit, it would get much better acceptance in business, etc.
>>
>>Just my two cents,
>>
>>Hans
>>
>>
> 
>