Transcript: PHP Web Frameworks - Roman Pronskiy

Hello, Will.

And I'm very happy to be joined by my JetBrains colleague, Roman Pronsky. Welcome to the show.

Thank you, Will. Hi, Carlton. Hi, everyone. Happy to be here.

Hi, Roman. Thanks for coming on.

So I wanted to have you on for a long time because you are executive director of PHP, which we'll talk about that, but also very involved just in the PHP world, which we in Python Django can get a bit insular and not be aware of, you know, what Laravel and all these other things are doing.

So I want to talk to you about your background and then web stuff.

Oh, Carlton, you have another agenda?

certainly the older ones got a start with php right it was like well how did you get into it

well i was doing php and then i found django later on so i mean that was back probably php4 php5 back

in the day it's come on a long way like that so one thing i'm really interested to talk to you

about is how the language has evolved oh yeah oh yeah um over that time and then the other thing

i'm sure will will top on is like we're always looking over the over the over the fence at the

different frameworks and particularly lara it's got a great marketing effort we're always like

oh we should do more in that space so you know talk about those kind of things would be amazing

absolutely gone well anyway that was i just wanted to say that so i'll just you know and and the

php and django 25 years ago but but maybe you were so maybe that's a way to ask uh how did you get

i started with turbo pascal back then uh it was just something available on our uh school class

machines that and uh gta1 if anyone remembers that game like with the top down view um so i

was a big fan of that one uh back then and i was yeah started programming this turbo pascal and

then i studied math in my uh uni and uh my um one of my teachers uh was organizing a conference uh

for math and uh she asked me hey can you program website for us i was like okay i need to google

what they do for websites uh because i was uh using of course yeah i was using c mostly in java

for all the stuff the university and i i opened php and i was i was shocked how easy it was to

to create a website uh and i was like oh my god this is so cool uh and then yeah i was looking

for a job after my uni i wanted to i wanted to do math but uh uh i guess i was not very um

i liked shiny things and just talking to people and i was not like um maybe introverted enough to

to do deep math so um yeah i i um i was looking for a job and i found a position vacancy for php

developer and i applied there they took me although i the only website i built was this

conference website and that's how i started with php and i stick with that for yeah 15 years um

so yeah i was i was doing other languages um on the during time so i was uh working as a software

engineer in different roles and i i used python quite a lot not django but just for apis

and javascript obviously both on server side and front end java a little bit also some once i had

to do salesforce development so i discovered that they actually have their own language sort of

like built maybe or originated from java but it's their own ecosystem

totally different so i had to do that and learn that so i had quite a well what the list what

blinking yeah because it was a um i mean it was a job like like i had to quickly get into it and

understand what's going on there so i was like okay i will do that no problem uh but i really

loved php all that time so whenever i was like away from php for a short time i was like i want

to go back to php for some reason i was just in love with uh php and um yeah ever since one thing

oh wow it's so easy to get the web page up or the website up and it's just there and that was that's

one of my lasting you know i started off with php it's one of my lasting memories if it really was

like yeah let's just no nonsense let's get it up let's you know include the header let's include

there's still all these things as can i ask you about how the language has evolved and has

has php managed to maintain that that kind of ease that you remembered is it is it still that

obviously the the requirements to web applications has changed and the expectations from of users

expectations from websites are totally different these days these the websites should be um very

dynamic and uh nice looking and a lot of functionality is uh is uh taken as given so

you like that website that i built back then for this conference uh it was just uh like these days

i wouldn't even use php i would probably just create like static pages i guess but um these

days is very dynamic but quick example i had to um i had to okay i hate i i had to vibe code

realize is like we've been you know half doing stuff since forever it's not a new thing indeed

vibe coded with uh using juni ai assistant of jet brains to um to create us uh i need i needed a

simple demo application and i used uh that simple simple demo application that uses some api so i

was using first i was like okay i will try a typescript and some javascript framework for that

um and um there are a bunch of those frameworks and i uh i've i tried next.js and then i tried

some other framework and um honestly it it didn't feel simple to be honest for me i mean i understand

javascript ecosystem a bit i know how to navigate but it didn't feel simple and i wasn't able to

get results real quick so it was like okay then i will just do the same with laravel and it was

i get i got the result almost immediately for like not for the sake of this like

python chat or django chat podcast i tried actually doing the same with python in pycharm

but i used uh not django i used um i think it's called fast right oh fast api yeah yeah i used

that uh and i was able to get results real quick as well so i i really like that experience so

i mean it's it's not just laravel but what i'm trying to say is that these days a php experience

is is the same as in it's very easy to build things you don't need to to do you have a simple

blocks that you can reuse for simple applications. And then on top of that, you can add your thing

and the ecosystem, like the number of packages and number of the things that people already

created for you. And the quality of those things is amazing. So for example, if I need ORM or if

I need a library that uses a certain API in PHP, the quality is just so good. I can be sure that

it's working, maintained. I'm super happy with the quality. With JavaScript, I guess maybe if you're

very much in the javascript or python ecosystems and you you know some things better maybe it's

also the same experiences and uh you know what to use and the quality is there but

at least with javascript i felt like there are many things that are nice ideas

and but not like deep enough to use it uh well for something real at least i mean i don't want

sound uh as an old guy here it's not but uh that was my at least feeling my impression

what you know and it's not that you know one ecosystem is better than the other one tool's

better than the other it's where is your happy place and what i liked from your answer was you

were like i started php with this happy base and my question was did it maintain that yeah and the

answers yes absolutely has as it's quite yes absolutely yes i'm yeah it has again i'm not

definitely my happy place and i feel super productive with php and the php stack um and it's

it's it's really easy to build applications really quickly with the php these days um so i'm super

get to his background because the other thing that i really remember was just the deployment

story was just perfect and it was you know the the old joke was asking can a can of beer right

you just put it up and it went and it's it's it feels like something when um because it was

built into apache and because you know mod php and it was just like you know just pick up the

the file and load it there was no deployment story um whereas when once you move to a kind

of application server and then you've got a reverse proxy and it just becomes much more

complicated and so my other my other sort of question is has php managed to maintain a good

deployment story there or is it did it did it follow the is it very similar to say bison or

rust or um a ruby environment where you're running two applications and it can be a bit difficult to

it maintained this simplicity for uh just deploying files wherever when wherever you want like to just

to a web server somewhere and you can set up this web server however you like it could be a shared

hosting or it could be a dedicated server or it could be some cloud provider uh like aws or

cloudflare whatever so in this sense it's it's similar to other i i guess uh web stacks so

it's quite simple still but it's not that much different maybe from other stacks well it was

javascript i guess you need uh is that you need um the difference is that with javascript you

usually you have some kind of transpiling compilation stage usually these days so you

have typescript or you have some other things and um so this thing and also uh javascript model of

running is that it's um is always running and it handles your requests asynchronously where with

php the model is very simple as in uh you serve the request and then you die uh i mean this and

And that simplifies things very much.

So basically, you think about it as a serverless by design.

So it's a shared nothing architecture where you serve something,

you throw out the response, and that's it.

So for simple applications like web applications or many APIs,

it's so simple and it simplifies things

and it simplifies the development and deployment as well.

However, we see that many applications, they use Docker.

And for Docker, again, I can say it's simple,

but maybe it's a little bit different from JavaScript, again,

because JavaScript comes with an HTTP server out of the box.

I'm speaking about Node.js, which it comes with a HTTP server.

So you can kind of have an isolated microservice

with no, like, additional web server on top of it,

like Nginx or whatever.

You can just have a microservice with JavaScript,

and that's it.

With Python, I don't remember,

but you kind of have additional tools.

It's similar.

You end up running, like, an application server

for your Python application,

and then you'll put a web server in front of that

so you'll have Nginx or whatever.

And it's that extra complexity that kind of,

moving from PHP to Python,

it was the one thing where it was like,

no, this is much more complicated.

It was, you know, just drag FTP up your file

and reload and it was done.

maybe PHP is slightly more complicated,

but just a little bit, I would say.

just because you always need this extra HTTP layer

on top of it if you want.

So one of the ways to actually navigate this

is there are like application servers for PHP

and one of them is FrankenPHP.

It's an application server built in Go language

on top of Caddy web server.

And this is now an officially PHP-supported project.

It's supported by the PHP Foundation.

And we see a lot of applications for this flow,

and we assume that it's going to simplify this kind of developments

or this kind of flows for users.

So it's not for all users, but we see that for many users,

it might simplify things.

uh has a lot of uh like it gained a user base real quick and we see many um many php users as in

companies using it in production uh very successfully so that's why uh we we kind of

recognized it as a crucial project within the PHP ecosystem already.

And that kind of gives it a seal of approval, right?

Again, yeah, so it's an additional approval, an additional signal to businesses

that they can rely on it, so that it's going to be maintained if any security issue

come up we will fix them uh in like timely manner and uh yeah so it gives certainty and uh confidence

web frameworks um since you're neutral in that you're not from laravel or symphony is it fair

to say that Laravel and Symfony are the two dominant web frameworks for PHP these days?

in general surveys, we see that those two are most popular and dominant frameworks within

PHP ecosystem. The other framework-ish is WordPress, which is not a framework per se.

you can say it's a cms but in fact it kind of works as a framework if you think so if you like

think like deeply about it it's because it gives you again this uh certain

rules or uh guidelines how to build your applications and structure and it comes with

lots of tools built on top of it and extra packages built on top of it so you kind of

it's kind of as a web framework as well so i would say these three platforms we can use this

word maybe just to not confuse people or not trigger the purists so it's platforms the most

dominant yeah dominant platforms within php community so it's laravel symphony and wordpress

There are a few smaller players, smaller frameworks that have some maybe regional, let's say, preferences.

So, for example, in the United States, there is still CodeIgniter, popular.

Well, and in the Eastern European countries, there is E-framework.

in China there is a it's called Hyper F or Swole framework it's a another story it's very popular

in China so there are some yeah other players but on a global arena we can say totally that's

Laravel, Symfony and WordPress. Okay and then if you had to like if I came up to you at a conference

three over the others so with the larables and symphony it's um i would say they're very um

real fast because they have uh actually one thing that you may not know um symphony is a framework

that um it comes as a set of um packages separate packages let's say um symphony console is a

is a package to to create like uh cli commands or for example there is a http kernel with which is

a um just an uh a layer of handling http requests within symphony so the the fun fact is that laravel

is built on top of those components so his laravel is like at least 30 symphony under the hood

so they are very interconnected and that allowed laravel author to to build his framework real

fast because he used reused symphony components so it's a is basically the what i'm trying to say is

that the quality will be very high on both i think it's more about the taste as in if you prefer

maybe more street standards um more nicer design and maybe less quick code kind of things then you

would prefer symphony because it's uh i would say maybe more the design wise more uh correct in uh

Or at least they tried to make it more correct in many aspects

and reusable by other frameworks, as you can see.

Whereas Laravel is maybe leaning towards quick development

when you need to achieve results quicker.

And so it kind of cuts the corner somewhere.

So it will be good for, let's say, 85% of stuff you're doing.

Maybe if you're hitting this another 15%, it will be not so convenient

and you will have to work around stuff.

So, yeah, so I would say it's basically just a matter of your preference

in terms of like code style or how you prefer building applications.

So if you like kind of move quickly, roughly, I don't know.

And then Laravel is your choice.

And if you're like a more strict design,

then Symfony would be probably better.

So in this regards, I don't know if,

so I'm into music production

and in music production,

there is these different tools as well.

So there is Ableton, there is FL Studio,

there is some other things.

So I like to compare it as these tools

for those who are into music.

So FL Studio allows you to build stuff real quick.

It's a little bit messy,

but it allows you to build stuff real quick

and get results real quick.

ableton it's more strict but you can build good apps with both it's it's just a preference of

taste with wordpress i think there is a more uh con concrete or more specific uh um

guy a guy tends on when to use it you use wordpress when you have very specific task

for example you need to build um a web shop a very simple web shop then you would just go and use

WordPress with WooCommerce, because it's already there, everything available there

with all the payment systems, all the delivery systems, integrations, everything is just built

there. You just need to combine it real quick and that's it. Or for example, if you need just a

blog, yeah, just go use WordPress. It does that real nicely. Basically any task you may think

for a blog, it's already done there. So you don't need to rebuild it. But if your requirements are

not that clear or you're building something um more or less new um then you would choose framework

not wordpress and uh then you can i think can be successful with either laravel or symphony just

uh the style is the preference and you can also like even if you use laravel the good thing is

again you can use symphony components for different things it's they are very like uh

reusable so what but it's not reusable actually uh vice versa so if you're using symphony you

cannot easily use laravel components but you can if you're using laravel you can use symphony

saying you know why don't you have you know hosted deployment why don't you have easy payments

they a lot of them are consultants so they they hit that as you said that middle ground of

It's not WordPress. It's custom, but it's, I don't want to say standard stuff, but it's not, you know, the 80-85% is exactly what they want to do, and they can do quickly, and it's powerful.

You know, when you were talking, you know, Django, I teach to beginners, and one of Django's challenges is if somebody says, I want to have a blog and deploy it.

Carlton and I would say, oh, Django is perfect. Right. And it can be. But the reality is it takes more steps to build the blog than you would like. And you have to do a lot more learning that if you only really just want a blog, why would you bother when you could use WordPress or Laravel or something else?

And that doesn't even get to the deployment story, which, again, it's possible, like I have books and talks on this, to deploy Django simply, but it's still not as simple as anything in PHP land or even in JavaScript land.

So those are two big pain points for Django in particular.

It's seen as, I think, more complex than it is because it is very customizable and you have the power to do anything you want.

But that means it doesn't fit these quick use cases that newcomers often want to use.

Carlton, what were you going to say?

parts of sympathy and it sounded i guess i'd ask from your your response there is would you

is it fair to say that maybe you could start with laravel and then sympathy something you

uh very often usually it's it's like religion you just start with the laravel and you stick to it

and then yeah yeah yeah it's yeah you just like it and you feel comfortable so we don't see

switching very often uh as in developers switching but the businesses uh sometimes switch

to one way or another uh i think their motivation is uh mostly like how easy is to find developers

um using this framework and um yeah so they they care about the results not much about the

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So I'd love to get the story of the foundation. But do you find when you introduce yourself to people and mention executive director of PHP Foundation, do people know that that exists? Because people don't know about that Django Software Foundation, for example. Most Django developers have no idea there's a nonprofit behind Django. I bet most Python developers also don't know about the Python Software Foundation. So I don't mean to put PHP on the spot here.

Mostly, at least those who are just socially active, those who can see somewhere either online or at the conferences or events, they usually know about the PHP Foundation.

They may not know the details or they may not know that I'm the director, but they know about its existence.

uh and then when i talk to other people uh in tech industry they sometimes they don't know even

why it's needed they say like oh but it's the language is free right and i'm like oh yeah it

is but uh how do you get like security updates do you like do you expect people coming like back

from their full-time job and uh fixing some security issues uh at night or how do you expect

such a technology be maintained and then then they talk to them and they explain and they oh wow

that's what you do okay then they see the importance of these kind of foundations and

then they just realize there is a whole world about supporting the open source which to them

have that realization do they get their checkbook out well yeah it's uh more complicated unfortunately

compared to other ecosystems and languages.

So almost all of them had these foundations, kind of.

So when I talk to, for example,

someone from the Python community

or JavaScript community,

I say, so it's like, let's say,

Python Foundation or Python Software Foundation.

Although there are differences,

but they immediately understand what I'm talking about.

Or Linux Foundation,

which is also a big organization. So yeah, and the reason for that is that for a long time, there was a commercial company called Zend, which kind of was the PHP company that was actually in their model or the description, the PHP company.

So PHP was developed with one developer, Rasmus Lerdorf started, and then two students from

Israel, Andy Gutmans and Ziv Suraski, they rebuilt the language, they rewrote it a few

times, and they started this company, Zend, which is the name is, it comes from their

names, combined Ziv and Andy.

so it's zend uh and they created this company and they were developing php most of the time

through the history and um like basically it was taken um the the it worked as as a

main entity behind the the language and it was a fine until it stopped being fine until

until this

it was

Zend company

was acquired

couple times

so

it was acquired

first by

Rogue

Wave Software

which is

some American company

I think they didn't know

what to do with

PHP

and many people left

and then it was acquired

by

Perforce

which is

at least they know

what is

open source

and they

were

doing better

but still

the they shrink and most of the people left the company and basically it's it

had it lost their influence and lost the manpower basically was just one they

paid one core developer just one developer maintaining the language and

that's it and then another was actually paid by

JetBrains so there were only two developers paid to work on PHP and the

The serious situation, this situation was bizarre, if you think about it.

Like, the whole, like, 80% of the web was working on PHP, so many businesses relying on PHP, and only two people in the world are paid to maintain the language.

That's it.

And I just want to mention, it's also, and JetBrains was one of the two, because JetBrains has also been very generous to Django.

And I know this because I was the treasurer of Django for a while, but I feel like most people, most, definitely most people have no idea about JetBrains' contributions to Django.

I suspect most, even in the PHP world, would most people know that JetBrains funded half of the language for a while?

I would, I would guess not.

I hope some of them know.

Maybe, I hope so.

Yeah.

I hope so.

But yeah, well.

like it's not microsoft you know to pick a competitor of ours you know like it's not

and then but uh we well there was a one of the php uh community and people one of the developers

one of the core maintainers he wrote a blog post uh where he he said like hey but do you know what

the bus factor of the php and he said it's two basically there are just two these people and if

bus hits them then php is done because they just have all the knowledge about the php and uh well

i realized this that problem as well so i reached out to this guy and we started talking how to fix

that and um yeah we come up with this idea of the php foundation so i started talking to other people

in the community just to try to gather some uh people who are interested and then that's the time

when we knew that we we found out that this uh jet brains uh this guy who was sponsored by jet

brains to work on php that he is going to um leave uh basically php and jet brains uh and go to red

had to work on LLVM that was his another passion and he was young we knew that this

would happen sometime so we kind of expected it but it's okay so it was

but it's what I'm trying to say that in this this news it it amplified everything

with the PHP foundation and we had to act quicker so what I did is I reached out to

major php companies so wordpress laravel symphony packages it's a company that is building

package repositories sort of like pi pi but for php and

and a few other companies so i reached out to them and asked hey so this is the idea we want

something sustainable for php let's start the php foundation just give us money and let's go

so we yeah i outlined the plan and all the companies gave some money some of them gave

more like jet brains and wordpress some of them gave less and there was enough money to hire

a few developers so what we did basically back then is we offered those who we started like

an application form. And those who already had some like history of contribution to PHP

and wanted to do that, uh, basically as a paid work, we offered them contract and they,

it was four people, uh, at the beginning, I think. Uh, and they were, they were like just

part-time developers and, uh, at the beginning. And then slowly they, some of them went full-time.

then we grew the team to 10 developers so right now we are 10 developers and some of them are

part-time some full-time and yeah so this is what we achieved in almost four years so it's a little

bit more than three years so I think it's quite impressive and I think we started as a very young

a very not ambitious organization as in our goal was very humble and very let's say the scope was

very narrow consciously so okay we were like let's get money from businesses and pay developers to

maintain language basically pay and spray and pray as they say that that sounds like you could

that language is at least sustainable and then when you're talking about well you've got 10

developers being paid well obviously that gives capacity to think about pushing forward and

we we received investment from german government and that's when we decided okay we we received

the investment so and they give investment it's not a grant so they give money for very specific

projects and we were like okay so we can now be more proactive we can plan projects consciously

maybe longer projects and when we have this investment and investment is great because

it's basically a guarantee that we will have money for this project where with sponsors is

always uncertain we don't know the sponsor can drop out anytime with this investment from

government we knew that okay we will definitely have this money so we can expand the team and

start these projects and we were yeah we were very lucky to get this investment and

i mean it was not just luck it was a lot of preparation to to work to get it but still i

think there is a lot of luck playing a role as well. So we

last 10%. Yeah. So but we found developers to work on those

projects. So we became less humble and maybe more ambitious,

still trying to be not too ambitious, because, again, we're

not a commercial entity, we're a nonprofit. So we very much rely

on sponsors and sponsors, they the their business can change.

Sometimes it goes up, for example, like with WordPress or

WordPress generously increased their amount of their donation

to the PHP foundation, which is super great. The WordPress they

were given money was no questions asked, asked from,

like, first day, they were like, Yes, this is the money to it.

And so, yeah, but some sponsors, their business changes for different reasons and they stop sponsoring and it's normal.

So we try to be very careful with expanding.

And even 10 developers is already quite a big team.

Yeah, no, it's massive.

yeah it's uh we're we're trying to not expand um when we don't need to just not to expand for the

sake of expand and that and actually we one idea we are thinking about right now is maybe work more

just like project um on project basis so for example we have a certain feature idea or a

certain project then we can sponsor this project and sponsor people to work on this project

specifically, deliver it and then see what we need next. That works for things with a very

with some isolated things. So for example, one of the things we did is a security audit

for PHP. And it was the first external security audit in long time, at least in 10 years.

So, and what we did is we, we found an agency, basically like penetration agency, security

agency, and they analyzed part of the code base, not the whole code base because our

budget was limited, but part of the code base, they analyzed it and they provided report

and actually they found a few severe security issues.

It took us almost half a year to fix those issues

because those were very severe issues.

But the result is amazing.

The developers were like,

whoa, we didn't know we had these issues.

Yeah, so I think this is an example of a very nice project.

If you think the funding horizon is nice and rosy

for the for the medium term what are your kind of headline things that you'd like to really you know

if you could you could get those fixed or mad um yeah well uh we i think we're um we have a really

are very productive with php so there are many companies that are using php that you might

not know um for example like before i met my girlfriend uh i was um actively using uh dating

apps and one of them is bumble and bumble is a php company so i was uh i was actually yeah talking

to them they're very like they're if you think about their load is very extreme that like they're

very high load application their response should be very fast because people like swiping and doing

stuff like the user base is insane no patience if it doesn't swipe quickly yeah so and they use php

and they are super productive with php and we we like with our sponsors we have many of those who

are like we're super happy with using php our business grows it allows us to move fast but

what i think is that people that are um that used php long time ago when they started they their

their perception of PHP remained the same.

So it's like that, like it was back then.

So we are trying to change this perception,

trying to show like, hey, you can do really cool things with PHP.

I mean, of course you can do it with other languages,

but if you already know PHP or you want to move fast

or you have developers who know PHP,

you can be very productive and very successful uh and like time to market is something that is

very important these days like almost anyone can build anything so you have to be quick

and php allows to do that so with that's i think one of our missions is to um

people who use php are happy with php and they like how things go in and evolving but people

outside of php they don't know much so me coming to this uh podcast is also a part of the strategy

what you've described is very similar to the conversation we have in django all the time you

know it's like you know there are companies using it exactly building great exciting things

people inside the ecosystem very happy with it but how do we reach out beyond that it's

you know i think it's a standard problem that evangelism message and speak like something that

really good at marketing yeah so but i mean actually there are a taylor outwell who is the

author of laro framework he built the framework uh just by himself and uh there are a few podcasts

that you can people can listen about and he was talking about the marketing how he was doing the

marketing and it's when you listen to that you're like but those are like very obvious things just

i don't know build documentation talk to your users uh be where where your users are make your

users happy uh do the things that bring the most value and uh have the least effort um like simple

things um and that's it still need doing right yeah yeah but uh yeah i mean the guy is really

good in marketing what can i say and uh yeah but and then they received investment so they are now

backed by a excel venture uh capital so yeah i guess they're super successful well things

just realization of you know an open source non-profit versus you know taking vc money

and especially with you know one person in charge so in the python ecosystem fast api

with sebastian you know he started that he just took a bunch of investment um maybe from excel

as well or sequoia i think um he also just raised a bunch of money he's going to build he's building

a hosting platform similar to what Laravel has done. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. I don't

think you can say one approach is better than the other, but certainly Python and definitely Django

because there's one and a half people paid to work on Django, like total. Carlton was one of

these people for five years, you know, so it moves a lot slower than, you know, some of these other

ecosystems. But on the other hand, it's been around 25 years. It does all these great things.

There's not as much of a bus factor as, you know, Laravel, right? If Taylor, something happened to

him, there is a community, but there's these risks. So anyways, yeah, when you deal with

the technology, it always comes down to kind of the people and the business sides of it of like,

oh, how can they move so fast? And, you know, well, you know, you're the executive director

foundation right it all comes down to people and absolutely yes i think one thing they did

laravel from day one so basically he as you said he built this um deployment tool and then other

tools and they were like paid tools the framework was free open source and all the ecosystem around

the framework was open source and free but he built additional tools and that allowed him to

basically work full-time on the open source which for example with symphony they they had different

model they didn't have company for a long time behind them so uh yeah it's i think it can work

different ways both ways you know going fully open source um and having commercial products

foundation works with open collective can you talk about what that relationship is because

django for example doesn't but it's something we look at and think about well um so yeah uh we

with as less hustle as possible just basically two things uh and the open collective uh i was

in contact with the e-framework um maintainer and author and i talked to him and a few other

people who use different platforms and for collecting money and open collective had the

really great recommendations um so we started with the open collective they they basically

work as a an umbrella organization for different nonprofits so you don't have to register your own

entity or your own nonprofit to work with open collective they take care of that for you as well

as they provide uh money uh money platform basically platform to collect money and uh we

we were and we are very happy with both one thing to mention is the fee which is 10 which is quite

high fee uh on my opinion especially for us when our budget is almost almost a million per year

so it's uh the fees are quite uh big as well uh we could in theory hire a person for for that fee

yeah extra developer yeah but uh but on the other hand they take care of everything for us so all

the contracts everything they take care of it one maybe disadvantage addition in addition to money

is that uh the they provide you this non-profit um american non-profit uh entity it's it has some

code which is 501 3c yeah so and it's not three it's six and the difference is that uh six uh

was six i don't know the details but uh the difference is that there was six you

the organizations that are 501 three i forgot like yes 501 c3 versus 501 c6 i forget them too

yeah yeah so this the sixth one i think it can do political stuff in the u.s and this is why

sometimes you cannot apply for different open source programs for example you cannot get

google workspace for free with this kind of entity but if you were 501c3 then you can get

So this is difference, but, uh, for example, sometimes we, when we cannot

apply automatically, I just reach out to these companies and I tell them about

the PHP foundation and they're, they're like, oh yes, okay, no worries.

We can, of course, we are not a political organization or whatever.

So just, yeah, for example, that worked with Slack and Slack is a company built

on top of PHP, I mean, they don't use PHP these days, they use a dialect of

php called hack but uh it was built on top of php yeah i think um well back in the day facebook

facebook was built on top of php but then at some point they build their own um virtual machine for

php called hhvm hip hop yeah you're right uh vm and then they built their own uh php dialect called

hack and uh then they split completely and they said we we we cannot like support both anymore

so we will just focus on our own hack language and basically in the world there are just these

circles built with django and uh there's still a sliver of it within meta now but they have their

own version of django basically where they swap swapped in different things and um do they

contribute back something or that is a good question um for two years i think when mike

sorry for two years when mike krieger one of the founders um was still there they contributed

i think twenty five thousand dollars um and otherwise nothing correct me if i'm wrong

contributed back but the um the work um into python core and into c python uh coming out of

meta was based off that um based off instagram's need so it's not you know it's not django per se

went to facebook worked on python um so yeah something could they do more yeah they could

You know, I mean, you were at JetBrains working on PHP Storm. Like, you know, I feel like JetBrains, I don't know if it's cultural or it's marketing or what it is, but I feel like the actual contributions far exceed these other companies with trillion dollar market caps. But they, you know, we could do more to talk about what JetBrains does because it on the ground does a lot for many languages and frameworks.

so yeah jet brands like is very generous and i think jet brands could do much more like just

talking about that and speaking about that because and of course that that could probably maybe um

help other companies to you know also do the same or just convince them nothing like setting

a good example yeah yeah yeah exactly there is a actually this open source uh pledge program

is it was launched by sentry so basically they wanted to encourage companies to yeah to donate

to uh open source and um but uh the rules that they have uh i think you have a they have like

a certain threshold when you qualify uh for this kind of um for their program and unfortunately

JetBrains actually doesn't qualify because the headcount of JetBrains is quite big.

So although they donate a lot, it's easier for smaller companies to qualify for this,

which is unfortunate because it would be... So for example, let me clarify. So for example,

if microsoft donates let's say to python or to django or to php uh let's say a hundred thousand

for them it's like zero zero zero zero point one percent of their yeah revenue uh but um

so they don't qualify sort of for this program but if for example a small company of three

people donates 100 100 000 per year that's for them like a lot so um

So I'm trying to say that this is a great program

to raise awareness of the problem

and just to make companies to donate.

But it could be maybe a little bit better

in kind of shifting towards big corporations

donating to ecosystems.

as you go up, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

i do want to mention so people who want to learn more about php you have a number of resources you

have the php annotated newsletter right we'll have a link to that you have a youtube channel

the show there was a recent there's an episode an article you linked in the latest issue which

about from php version 3 to version 8 and how how it's evolved and that was perfect for me because

i was like i didn't know about what had gone into 7 and 8 and so i went back i was like oh yeah i

remember this i remember this i remember this okay that was a right and that was a really good

of time to prepare this um php annotated newsletter because it's it's handcrafted so i don't i i go

through all the news and read all the tweets myself it takes a lot of time but uh the result

is that it's very concentrated

and I usually find things

that are not available anywhere else

and I'm happy that it helps the community

to catch up on what's happened

on what happened in PHP world

and not read through all the noise

and I think there are a bunch of other resources

out there

for example for Laravel

it's Laravel News

it's their website

It's quite an interesting website, I think.

For YouTube, I think there is a PHP-annotated YouTube channel,

which is made by our colleague, Brent.

It's a really nice YouTube channel about PHP and all things around it.

I mean, you talk about many things.

I mean, I really liked your MCP server video.

Oh, thank you.

We haven't even talked about AI in this talk,

but you know you and i on the ground php store and pie charm all the or many of the jet brains

that and this um the creator of uh mcp he now works at entropic but back in the day he used to

be a php core developer and he was a release manager of one of the php versions uh yeah his

name is david soria para so i was i actually invited him to come to a php is gonna turn

it's turning 30 years uh so it's the birthday will be on june 8th yeah so i invited david

to come to celebration to amsterdam office so we're gonna have a celebration party

celebration event jetbrains office in amsterdam so we invited a bunch of different people from

the php community to come uh to mingle and uh we'll do we'll do some like online streaming

event just streaming interviews and talks from them and i invited david and a bunch of other

people who are not in php anymore but they used to be part of the php world

unfortunately he he told me that he has a meeting with bill gates the same day so

he couldn't make it

hmm

okay

what an excuse

yeah but

I'm using PHP to build

MCP servers

I was actually I tried both

Python and

JavaScript and Kotlin

but I was like I really want to

do it with PHP and I found

I really like the UVX

so it's

It's like a runner for PHP, for Python scripts.

It's super cool.

I really like it.

So I built a small Python package that allows you to run PHP scripts

or PHP packages with UVX.

But basically what it does...

This is the way.

This is the way.

Behind the scenes, what it does, it downloads PHP and runs PHP script.

But it just works so fast, so smoothly.

and i wanted my friends who don't have php installed just but they do have python i want

them being able to run my mcp servers easily and so i can just give them one command and they can

at PyCon US, which just happened, I think it was Charlie from Astral, so UV Rough.

He had sort of an open space, and it was unsurprisingly very, very crowded. They just

released a type checker. I think it's called Ty. So that's another case of a small group of people

got some funding, doing really great stuff, rewriting everything from the ground up.

And yeah, we've talked about UV on this podcast, but I think most people would not have assumed that a package manager could, you know, in a year do what it's done in terms of popularity.

It seemed like an area that was just too difficult and too convoluted, and they just blasted through.

And now they're kind of working their way through the Python ecosystem doing that.

I admire it very much.

It's such a nice tool and the, you know, the other people may have like, you know,

take it for granted, like, okay, we have, uh, we have already a package manager.

Why don't, why do we need another one?

And it's impossible to build another one, but then they come and they just.

They did.

They did.

um so people want to connect or see more we you have a we'll put links you have a personal site

uh you have a youtube channel php annotated people should obviously check out php storm

if they need an ide uh any other follow you on the socials we'll put links yeah i'm quite active

in a read-only mode, I reply to everyone.

So feel free to reach out.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

We've had some scheduling issues getting this in

because you've been very busy, but appreciate this.

One of our first episodes was with David Hennemeyer Hansen

from Ruby on Rails.

Oh, nice.

So this is a tradition, and I hope every year or two

to have someone from the outside come in

and shed some light on, you know,

what else is going on in the programming world.

Thank you so much for having me.

and I'm happy to collaborate with the Django world

and the Python world.

Thank you, Will.

Thank you, Carlton.

Thanks again.

So djangochat.com,

links to everything in the show notes

and we'll see everyone next time.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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