Yahoo Lays Out Welcome Mat For PHP Devs


Yahoo is expanding its support for PHP, with the launch this week of the PHP Developer Center as part of
the Yahoo Developer Network.


PHP and Yahoo are certainly not strangers. Rasmus Lehrdorf, the original
creator of PHP, is actually a Yahoo employee after all.


The new PHP Developer Center on the Yahoo Developer Network includes how to
articles, code samples and other resources in support of helping PHP
developers integrate applications with Yahoo Web Services.


“What we’re trying to do in the developer network is support third-party
developers and make it easier for them to develop Web site and other
applications that integrate with Yahoo,” Jeffery McManus, director of Yahoo
Developer Network, told internetnews.com.


McManus explained that giving language-specific assistance to developers goes
a long way toward not only helping them get up to speed and integrating with
the platform but it also creates a lot of interest in the platform, as well.


“It basically tells developers that if you are coding in PHP, you are welcome
and we would love to have you write applications that integrate with
Yahoo,” McManus said.


PHP is one of the most popular open source languages currently in use and is
a core component of the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) application stack.

PHP
has come a long way since Lehrdorf’s original effort over a decade
ago. Three release versions are on the horizon, and it is a viable challenger to Java and .NET.


The developer network team, as well as other technologists within Yahoo,
including Lehrdorf, contributed to the code and
content.


“[Lehrdorf] actually contributed some code examples and has been
tremendously supportive of the efforts that we have undertaken to open Yahoo
using Web Services almost from the beginning,” McManus said.

“He’s been
very influential and obviously has a lot of depth on the platform and is in
a lot of ways a guiding light, particularly with respect to what we are doing
with PHP developers.”


McManus admitted that Yahoo currently doesn’t know exactly how many
developers may consume Web Services via PHP.


“It’s a chicken and an egg problem: without a PHP Developer Center we don’t
end up with a critical mass with a community of PHP developers,” McManus
said. “One of the objectives behind launching the center is that we now have
a Yahoo PHP community specifically to help developers who are coding in PHP
and utilizing Yahoo Web Services.”


According to McManus there are more than 20,000 developers using various
Yahoo technologies.

PHP is not the first and it won’t be the last language-specific center in the Yahoo Developer Network either.

A JavaScript
Developer Center
was launched in December and McManus expects to do others, soon.


“Ultimately it is our objective to provide a language-specific development
center for every language that matters,” McManus said. “It’s just a matter
of which ones we get to first.”

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