Introducing the new PHP on Heroku

Ironically, the old WordPress motto was "code is poetry".

What's your favorite example of great, maintainable open source software written in clean PHP?

I'd like to look at a good example to give it another chance.

can we tone down the elitist attitude? i personally enjoy how simple WP is to use and extend - that's one of its core strengths. As with any complex piece of software, there are a few wtf's to be had.

Meh. I don't mind it, and it drives some of my eCommerce sites through WooCommerce. Nothing huge of course, but annual sales in the six figures. It's not that bad, really.

I've got nothing against Laravel (other than Blade, and my own personal prejudice against ORMs and html generators), I use it and I like it a lot. I'm just saying a lot of what people seem to hate about PHP can be avoided without dependencies on much besides Symfony by way of Composer or even a framework at all - although this depends on how you define "framework."

Which is an interesting question in and of itself - what's the minimum viable feature set for a modern PHP framework? I would say a PSR autoloader, Composer and a url router, and everything else is superfluous. Most people wouldn't even count that as a microframework, and I understand that. And it probably wouldn't scale for crap either.

Although one thing I really like about laravel, which technically has nothing to do with laravel, is Artisan. Using .phar files as command line applications doesn't get as much attention as it should, maybe.

Nice,Fellow french,here,i definetly need to check out your paas!

We've had huge buy-in from Ruby as it's pretty difficult to set up and deploy a Ruby stack. Where as with PHP it's basically supported out of the box by pretty much everyone.

It's hard to sell Heroku which is why we have the free trial dynos. I find most people either love us see us as a huge value add, or don't understand why anyone would use us.

We're not simply a small abstraction layer, instead we support deployment at the application layer. Which again basically sounds like meaningless fluff unless you've already bought into the product. If I had to sum it up, i would say we're a company that provides a collection of small, sharp, extremely well integrated tools that seek to make your production development experience more pleasant.

For Ruby you get the app setup which is huge, but then you also get process monitoring out of the box so if your app goes down due to hardware failure we get paged at 3am instead of you. It's extremely easy to do things like have multiple staging servers, and I really like our CLI.

Instead of trying Heroku, I would recommend starting off trying out Heroku Postgres and using it through whatever server you deploy to right now. Get the credentials from the CLI.

On a production DB you get forks, and followers. We also have point in time recovery which is pretty fancy. Hacker destroy your DB? Forgot to schedule a backup? Rollback to 1 second before the deletions, and done. If you like Heroku Postgres, then I would recommend trying the dynos, and if not: agree to disagree.

For PHP the sell is management, stability, and consistency. If you're on a shared host your performance is very inconsistent as well as your uptime. If you're on a VPS you have pretty decent performance but now you have to manage everything manually, and even then there's that uptime thing we're not 5 nine's but hopefully above most: https://status.heroku.com/uptime.

I honestly don't think we're right for every application, every developer, and every scenario. When we are though I hope to provide the best experience possible.

Which is unfortunate. Symfony + Composer is powerful elegant (yes elegant) stuff.

I feel no need to hate a language, but I recognize that I have a feeling of hatred towards it. I also recognize that such feelings bias my words and feel that it is helpful to others when known biases are disclosed.

In this context, I think disclosing my emotions towards the language tells others that while I dislike PHP the way Heroku phrased their "makers at heart" was a positive sentiment that I could agree with. It seemed relevant.

Why do I hate it at 80%?

Because it burned me in the past. Because it makes doing things right hard. Because other people make the same mistakes over and over and yet I still have to use it on occasion.

It's an emotion built up after years of negative experiences. My emotional experience with PHP went from Interested to Excited to Cautious to Wary to Hateful.

For me, PHP was the friend that promised the moon and when he did show up he came with week-old dried out cheese instead of the moon that he promised.

Cumulative bad experiences, especially when larger factors (legacy decisions, inertia, switching costs, etc) force you to continue having those bad experiences, leads to negative emotions.

Call it extreme dislike if you want, but for me it is a lesser form of hate.

Note that this is all personal description. Perhaps it was the timing (04-08) perhaps it was my level of experience, perhaps it was bad luck. I realize that some people have unanimously or mostly positive experiences with PHP and I'm not trying to diminish their experiences.

Setting aside my own biases on the subject and giving the OP the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the OP feels that PHP is some kind of local maximum of some characteristic that makes languages good for the lives of programmers, but s/he feels there are much greater nearby local maxima. Perhaps the OP doesn't hate PHP as much as s/he hates that some programmers haven't found greater productivity/peace/enlightenment/whatever because they're locally maximizing and have settled into the local maximum of PHP, which s/he feels is much below nearby local maxima. In this view, the lives of programmers would be better if the PHP local maximum did not exist. I'm intentionally not commenting on the validity of this view.

Playing devil's advocate, perhaps it's even noble to hate a non-sentient thing which one believes impedes the progress of sentient things.

Passionate language like that is used all over the industry, especially from start ups. So why is it a big deal if it's used to describe PHP?

If the Ruby on Rails blog made a post saying "Rubyists are makers at heart." would you complain?

No worries. I start a lot of writing with a "hook" first sentence and try to end with a memorable sentence. I then diagram the work into bullet points and try to make sure all key takeaways are obvious, note I didn't actually work on the _final_ draft of this doc. I was pleasantly surprised to find they left my first sentence in there.

Some hooks are better than others. I'm an engineer before a writer. It sucks that we have to market tech things, but the sad truth is most announcements that have no "hype" get no hype. I do a bunch of open source work, and some projects I promote and they do well, others I don't promote and they don't do as well.

Generally at Heroku I try to only put one or two flashy sentences in. The rest should be direct substance delivery, though that's not always the case. Thanks for taking the time to click the link, read, and comment!