Interview - PHP-GTK's Andrei Zmievski

Andrei Zmievski is a man of many talents. Although he is best known for his contributions to the PHP-GTK and Smarty Template Engine projects, his interests range as far afield as history and linguistics. The PHP community is lucky to have kept his attention for this long!

In this exclusive interview, Andrei tells us what drew him to PHP and what plans he has for the future.

Beginnings

SP: Firstly, can you tell us a little about your background? What originally got you into software development?

AZ: I am originally from Uzbekistan, been living in the USA for the past 10 years. I started programming when I was 9 or 10, first on programmable calculators, and then on bigger and better machines. I have to credit my parents with recognizing and supporting my interests in this area, buying me books, magazines, and even computers.

SP: When did you first come across PHP, and what was it that "got you hooked"?

AZ: PHP first appeared on my horizon some time in 1997. At work we purchased Apache StrongHold package and it came with PHP 2 and some documentation for it. Initially, it seemed a simple curiousity because our systems were all written in a different, proprietary 3rd party language. But at the beginning of 1998 we started switching all our products to PHP, because it proved to be more familiar to people with background in C and Perl, more flexible, with pretty good support from the community, but most importantly, it was free of licensing costs. Personally, I liked that it came with a fairly good and easy to use API. These reasons remain PHP's strengths to this day.

On PHP

SP: Are you still actively involved in the PHP project?

AZ: Yes, although I took a hiatus recently. After 3 years I needed a little break from the barrage of mailing list messages, bugs, and other similar things. I am still not subscribed to the lists, rather I monitor them through the Web interface. This is a bit of a transitional period for me, but I expect to be back in the saddle by the end of summer.

SP: What's your opinion of recent changes to PHP, like register_globals off in 4.2.0, and the new pre-defined variables in 4.1.0?

AZ: I think it is a step in the right direction. These changes make PHP more consistent and secure at the same time.

SP: Do you think PHP has reached maturity? What further big enhancements to security do you see coming?

AZ: How does one define maturity in this field? Is it the number of programs written with the language? The number of libraries available for it? The amount of documentation and tutorials it has? If so, then PHP passes the mark easily.

As far as security, the biggest thing would be overhauling the safe mode as a basic sandbox mechanism.

SP: Where does PHP stand in the light of Microsoft's .NET?

AZ: .NET is a fairly interesting technology, and I especially like its class library. However, I do not see what extraordinary benefits it could offer PHP. For one, .NET doesn't yet play nicely with loosely typed languages. And then there is the question of all those extensions that PHP relies on. Having PHP be a fully-fledged .NET language would require a lot of investment of time and effort with little potential payoff.

That said, there is already a dotnet extension available that lets you instantiate .NET objects and invoke methods on them (on Win32 platforms only so far).

On Smarty

SP: On Smarty and general separation of coding logic from content, do you feel that PHP has solutions that satisfy both PHP coders and Web designers?

AZ: Yes.

SP: What else would like, or are you planning to do with Smarty?

AZ: Make it more modular, more lightweight, so that only necessary pieces are loaded for each stage. Also I'd like to rework the API and the language to be more consistent and easier to use, but we have to be aware of the backward compatibility. The documentation could stand to be improved, of course, but I feel that this task is best left to the community of Smarty users.

SP: One of PHP's disadvantages is the sheer number of different approaches to programming it encompasses, each backed with it's own Open Source project (for example, Smarty vs. FastTemplate, if you'll excuse the comparison). Do you feel the Pear library is ready to deliver a standard application framework for PHP? Is there an alternative project you feel should be endorsed by the PHP group?

AZ: First of all, PHP group is not in the business of endorsing projects or products.

Secondly, PEAR has made great strides in the last few months and with the 4.3.0 release of PHP it will finally be possible to transparently download and install whatever libraries you wish. But PEAR is not an application framework, rather it is a collection of components, some of them serving the same purpose, that can help you rapidly develop your applications.

Thirdly, "the sheer number of different approaches" seems to be an intrinsic property of open source development, and not necessarily a deleterious one.

SP: Apart from those you're been involved in, which Open Source projects written in PHP have impressed you most?

AZ: Gallery - the online photo album software. Swwwing - a groupware tool made by a company in Denmark. JPGraph - a Graph drawing library. And then there is a web server written in PHP...