One of the boons for web application development at the turn of the century has been the open source revolution. With their seeds sown in the 90’s, open source technologies changed the face of web applications by reducing development timeframes, simplifying programming conundrums and eliminating tons of bugs plaguing the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). Almost all of these technologies have had their code base in PHP, which as everyone knows is the preferred programming standard across the globe.
In this article, we showcase some of these technologies as a token of our respect to their invaluable contribution to the PHO development community. Many a PHP Development Company could have differing opinions on this list and we accept them graciously.
First up, the godfather of them all; PHPNuke launched somewhere in 1999. This technology literally was and is the basis of a majority of the CMSs (Content Management Systems). Just a little prior to this release saw the inception of phpMyAdmin that was conceived for web-based administration of MySQL. Its later releases supported creation and dropping of databases and tables, fields, managing keys and privileges and a lot more.
A standard-based webmail package, SquirrelMail made its way to the market with integrated PHP support for IMAP and SMTP mail protocols. Wide browser compatibility using HTML 4.0 made it an instant favorite with PHP MySQL development communities across the globe. The turn of the century saw the dawn of osCommerce, an open source e-commerce solution that featured out-of-the-box installation allowing online merchants to easily set up e-tailing stores with minimum effort. Integrating the potent combination of PHP, Apache web server and MySQL database server, this technology created quite a sensation with its robust and stable architecture.
Another technology to take root around the same time was OpenX, inheriting its properties from phpAdsNew originating from Tobias Ratschiller’s efforts in 1988. A free ad server designed by the web publishing community for themselves, it provided complete management tools for online advertising. Swapping of paid banners with in-house advertisements was made easy, as was the integration of third-party advertising banners. Gallery was launched in 2001; an online web-based photo album utility providing users with a sleek UI to create and maintain photo albums online. Then comes, probably one of the most popular CMSs till date; Drupal. A modular CMS, it was ideally suited for forums, blogs, and community engines with a database-driven structure supporting MySQL, MySQLi and PostgreSQL. The year 2003 saw the launch of the WordPress, a cutting-edge personal publishing platform with capabilities far exceeding just blogging. Integrating high flexibility, WordPress supports link management, file attachments, XFN support, support for stand-alone pages, Atom and RSS feeds for both, content and comments, blogging API support, spam block, and most importantly; a flexible theme system.
The need for an open source CRM was addressed by SugarCRM. Joomla!, launched in 2005 is an award-winning online CMS with separate front end content and backend admin access, along with group-based access control. The open source e-commerce front was further bolstered by the entry of Magento, a widely flexible e-commerce CMS with complete control in the hands of e-tailers. With the growth and acceptance of cloud computing, eyeOS announced itself to the world providing a web-based desktop with 67 apps and multiple system utilities.
The list is endless and there can be many more technologies, such as Symfony, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, etc. that can be added to this list. But nothing is more consistent with the fact that PHP has been and will always be at the crux of all the latest developments have happened and will happen for some time to come.
We are GoodCore, a web application development company that is always primed to gain expertise in the newest technologies to breach the market and extend their development advantages to our clients across the world. If you need any PHP-based solution, you can hire PHP programmers from us. These individual are hand-picked for their vast repertoire of skills and talent, when it comes to developing and deploying state-of-the-art web applications in a cost-effective and timely manner. If it’s a PHP solution you need, GoodCore is the answer!
