Goodbye 2008!

Wow, what a rollercoaster ride 2008 was; in so many ways. The world faced the biggest financial crisis most of us have ever seen in our lives, the balance of power in the world shifted significantly and fuel prices both had an all time high and a 5 year low in the same year. Crazy times. And I think we haven't seen the end of it yet.

It's hard to analyse what the exact effect of all of this is on our own industry. If you look at TechCrunch's layoff tracker, it is clear that IT was not left unaffected. Several companies that are close to the PHP community have seen layoffs: SUN, current owner of MySQL, laid off about 5000 jobs; Yahoo, the biggest PHP user on the planet, laid off 1500 and even Zend was troubled by layoffs this year.

Yet, talking to the community and looking at our own customers leads me to believe that so far, the PHP ecosystem is less affected than other industries. Many PHP shops are still searching for PHP developers (yeah, so are we), and many companies I talk to tell me that, while some of their customers have become more cautious in their spending, there is still enough demand for PHP projects.

One reason for this might be that PHP is still in a place where demand outnumbers supply. Even if demand is reduced significantly based on the current economic climate, there still aren't enough PHP developers to meet that demand.

Another reason is that in times of economic downturn, companies start looking at cost effectiveness and become more aware of what they spend their money on. After the internet bubble, in the first years of this century, we had a similar situation and we noticed that back then that people started turning to open source solutions. PHP can benefit from a trend like that. Not only is PHP very cost efficient (no license cost, and quick time to market), the web in general can help companies streamline their business processes and become more efficient. Finally, within the PHP community there's a focus on efficiency as well: with a rise in the use of frameworks (I'll talk about the 'cms to framework' shift I see happening some other time), a focus on code quality, PHP's 'getting things done' mentality and the end-of-life of PHP4, PHP is strengthening its position as the right choice for web development.

For us at Ibuildings, our commitment to stick to PHP for web development has helped us grow about 40% this year, despite the economic situation; which strengthens my belief that we're in the right business and have chosen the right language. So I owe a big thank you to every member of the PHP community! (And with the Center of Expertise we'll be launching early next year, we'll try to give something back.)

It is still early to say how 2009 will affect us all, but let's hope that we've seen the worst of the economic crisis and that in 2009, things will start to look better for everyone.

I wanted to end this post with a number of PHP highlights in 2008; but keep an eye on my favourite source for PHP news, phpdeveloper.org, I'm sure people more qualified than me will write excellent 2008 lookbacks. :-)

Posted by Ivo Jansch
CTO
Ivo is the CTO of Ibuildings. He implements company strategy regarding tools, technology and development processes. Ivo is the contact for several key customers and partners, and a regular speaker at conferences.