Re: Better known PHP users list

> this is certainly a good thing, but imho, it suffers from the same problems that an official list do: > 1. there's no concrete urls clearly demonstrating the usage of php. That's why I don't have links for anything other than two sites currently (where the use of PHP is obvious in the links on the page) - I haven't had time to get URLs for each one. If anyone would like to contribute URLs that clearly use PHP, I'll put it up. > 2. it would be also nice to have (at least estimated) percentage of php usage on the site (e.g., the ratio |php-generated pages| / |all displayable pages|). This seems like it'd be a ton of work to do and it'd never be accurate when you consider that some people have PHP parsing .html and many are using something like mod_rewrite (e.g. how can we tell that /News/Business/Europe/ is treated as /news.php?Section=News/Business/Europe by Apache?). > many customers are curious about the "technology" used in their web sites, and get confused when they hear "php". much effort is needed to convince them, since they: > 1. want good-looking site. seems that to show another "good" site using php is enough. This is the need I had when I created that list - some sites by well known companies that use PHP. For the sort of exchanges that go like: Them: Okay, PHP sounds interesting but does anyone important really use it? You: That depends on whether you consider sites like $SITES[0], $SITES[1], $SITES[2] important. > 2. want "speed", whatever is meant by it. one can't explain the distinction between bandwidth, web server, application server, database server -- customers don't like things they don't understand. to show a "fast" site is not enough -- concrete benchmarks are needed. This is a very complicated issue & completely different than what I intended. The hardest problem customers will have is understanding that something like PHP probably won't be a noticeable factor in the performance of their site. Unless we're talking about value-free benchmarketing ("Our product NOPs 500% faster") you'd probably need to benchmark the specific application for that site or something similar that you've done to get even remotely meaningful numbers. > 3. want maintainability. they tend to think that with asp or other visual tool they don't need to hire qualified staff. the argument of the manager is "in an emergency even me (even a hardware technician) can fix it". this one is difficult. how would one show the equivalence of the maintenance to a person with strong prejudices / bias towards "visual" tools? This is an unrelated issue that's far to big for what I had in mind. Anyone who thinks that ASP can be written/maintained with a visual tool knows nothing about the product & should be politely informed of this. As far as the entire "visual RAD tool" vs. "real programming" debate, there are a number of research papers, essays and books which can be used to support one's case. Frankly, though, if you're dealing with a potential client who demands a point&drool environment and won't back down on that position, I'd recommend breaking off discussions with them. It'll almost certainly save you a lot of aggravation in future dealings; life is much too short to work with people who hire you for your technical knowledge and then completely ignore it.