PHP and the Enterprise

IBM and Zend has been pushing for the adoption of PHP in the enterprise. Although the threat has been framed in terms of Java losing ground, the alternate view is that PHP is targetting the realm of the situated software, which has traditionally been the mainstay of the venerable e-mail, Excel, Access and lately SharePoint¹.

I can imagine a forward-looking IT department which encourages user innovation by making it easy for users to create their own applications:

The provisioning of applications should not be the exclusive domain of the IT department. Instead, an IT should be more like a hosting service, where employees can throw together php applications, hooked to to an instance of their database, where IT provides the necessary hardware, backup and uptime.

However, PHP is not quite there yet. For this to be doable, several pieces need to be provisioned:

• An effective sandbox for PHP scripts, particularly within the enterprise. This is probably already there, since ISPs are pretty good at sandboxing
• A default library for dealing with identity within an enterprise. The occassional hacker should not have to roll their own password store, nor worry about which employee has left the organisation
• Automated back up for files, and database. User-driven innovation has to focus on application not maintenance.
• Activity monitor, for system administrators to clean up/archive unused applications
• For applications which may be compliance related, the database and file store should be automatically indexed for searchability within the entire enterprise, not only within the application itself.

¹ Incidentally, this is also JotSpot’s main target