Digging Through the Guts of Enterprise PHP: A Case Study

IBM Rational Build Forge started out as a small start-up company offering process automation software, most commonly used for automating software builds. As its customer base grew, its user interface made the change from a relatively simple PHP 4 web application to the Ajax-driven PHP 5 web application used today. During the migration to PHP 5 and a redesigned interface, IBM acquired the Austin-based company and introduced its own requirements and software standards.

In the journey to internationalization, scalability, performance tuning, and platform/database independence, the user interface used more and more of the language features and built-in functionality offered by PHP 5. The web application contains real world examples of how to use design patterns, class inheritance, interfaces, and Iterators in order to accelerate development while keeping functionality as reliable, maintainable, and fast as possible. This talk will explore how IBM Rational Build Forge uses PHP, looking at specific uses in the product today and coming in version 7.1.