Does anyone write really long, complex PHP apps? [closed]

Question

It's hard for me to imagine a php script that is more than a few hundred lines of code. It seems that, for a non-persistent environment, web-based scripting is usually done is small chunks and used for the purpose of delivering a portion of a website to the end user. I'd like to know if people are developing any type of large, or persistent, or complex apps with php, and what is it exactly you are working on. I've only done small projects for small websites, so I don't know what can be accomplished on a larger scale. It would also be nice to know what libraries you are using, and what other technologies you are integrating with. Please enlighten me so I can start to dream of bigger things!

Answer 1

I would look at some of the well-known open source web apps that use PHP to get a good sense of what can be accomplished, and how PHP is used in each of them. The advantage is that since they are all open source, you can actually look at the PHP code to see how various functionality was implemented.

Some good examples to look at include:

• WordPress
• TextPattern
• MediaWiki
• PhpBB *questionable code quality
• SugarCRM
• Joomla
• Drupal

Also look at some of the popular frameworks to see what kind of functionality they offer (this should give you a good sense of what types of things PHP is most often used for):

• Zend Framework
• CakePHP
• CodeIgniter
• Symfony