Interview - Matt Mecham of Ibforums

Are there any plans to have Ibforums converted to or written in Perl in the future?

We had considered porting Invision Board PHP to a Perl version, but have largely decided against it after polling the community. There may have been a need for it 12 months ago when PHP was still being picked up by Web hosts, but it seems now that PHP has reached the point that Perl had, in that 99% of Web hosts have it installed and freely available. I fact, I'd bet that there are more hosts that support PHP and MySQL than those that have taken the time and trouble to install the Perl interface for MySQL (the DBI modules). We do have an Invision Board "Lite" in the works, but this is being developed in slow time and its release will largely depend on the state of the market. We'll be reviewing the need for a Perl version when Perl 6 is released.

Have you done any benchmark tests to compare Ibforums with other scripts? A little while back, there were benchmark tests done to compare Ikonboard with other scripts -- can you let us know some details about that?

I try and stay away from pure benchmarks as much as I can. Designing a program just for speed is folly. A good design should put security first, usability second and efficiency third -- raw speed should be near the bottom somewhere. Let's face it, the difference between 0.03 and 0.1 is about the time it takes you to blink, we're not really able to distinguish between these measures. I've run some personal benchmarks with Invision Board, phpBB2, YaBB SE and vBulletin and on paper Invision Board is faster, but in "human" terms, there isn't much in it.

I certainly didn't approach Invision Board with the aim of making it the fastest board in it's field. When I was working on Ikonboard PHP (Aurora), David ran some tests based on what we had completed (reading, registering, posting, etc) against other boards. The test results showed that on his machine Aurora was faster and more efficient. The Jarvis Entertainment Group thought it good PR to advertise these figures. But whether or not the final version of Aurora would have out-performed its competitors will probably never be known.

What are you plans for Ibforums in the future? What new features have you planned for it?

Invision Board is a constantly evolving product. We get some good feedback and feature ideas from the community, and nearly all these suggestions are considered for inclusion if they have a broad enough appeal and are workable.

Future releases of Invision Board will focus primarily on optimization and efficiency. We're also in the process of completing more database drivers, including MS-SQL and pgSQL. We have a few ideas that we're keeping close to our chest to try and take Invision Board into different markets, but that's firmly in the "next year" category.

What about yourself? Do you intend to be associated with Ibforums in the future, or are you planning to be involved more in other areas of Invision Power Services?

I'll always be associated with Invision Board. Version 1.1 will probably be the last version I'll develop on my own as I have some other projects that I want to get off the ground for Invision Power Services. Having said that, Invision Board will always be taken seriously, and I'll still have a big say in its development and code structure -- I just feel it's got to the stage where the main core has been developed and stabilized, and immediate future releases will be mainly service releases.

We'd like to thank Matt for his time. We look forward to watching Ibforums and Invision Power Services continue their success in future!