In my last article I said I would be continuing my understanding PHP in three weeks. Things are not going according to my original schedule and I thought I would give you all an update.

Previously I spoke of the three pillars that hold up any great PHP programmer. At the time I had in my head something along the lines of:

  • An excellent command of PHP’s built-in functions.
  • Extensive real world experience building web based applications.
  • A thorough knowledge of general computer programming concepts

After I started to do some research for the article itself, it became apparent that I was missing a crucial element: Software Engineering. For those of you that aren’t 100% absolutely positive they know exactly what that means, you should check out the wikipedia entry on the subject. For the click-lazy, software engineering deals with ALL aspects of creating software, not just the programming part.

I was then trying to come up with the structure for the article. One of the ideas, which I’ve had in my head for a while, is to cover in detail a single request for a web page from start to finish. If you’re thinking you already know everything that happens when viewing a web page created in PHP, think again. I’m talking about everything from DNS lookups to databases indexes to operating system memory management techniques to TCP/IP. And of course PHP internals as well.

To make a long story short (hmmm… to late for that) a very prominent web site read my “How did we get here” article and has asked me to write a series of articles for them. Hopefully you’ll be able to start reading them in January. I can’t go into detail right now, but I can assure you it will be worth the wait.

Ophir