1st, Ben Johanson has been working for me for a couple of years now,
and he has worked with me hard on one particular project. Not related,
but he is having some serious digestive issues and isn't doing well,
in the ER at the moment, so if you know him, you may want to wish him
well. I am sure he would appreciate it.
BigHead's last major witango site, and by far biggest work in terms of
scope and use is peachdirect.com.
http://www.peachdirect.com/
This system was not only a very sophisticated ecommerce site,
basically a mini bestbuy type site, but also we wrote the entire
backend, including all vendor fullfillment, vendor communication, and
since this is a private credit card site, we wrote all of the
communication modules custom for communicating to the bank. Its a very
large system.
The site was written in witango, and then uses other languages, mainly
realbasic to deal with the bank com and the vendor system and such.
The peachdirect site is almost dormant now, but at its peak was doing
over $20 million per month in orders. At its peak, witango could
barely take it, we had lots of workarounds, and even wrote our own
page caching system in witango to help with the load. Originally,
several years ago, the witango site was only supposed to be up for a
few months, until they went to a bigger system.
Well, the company has completely changed their name and launched a new
site/system and are planning the $20 million/month level in just a
couple of months. This time, we wrote the ENTIRE system in PHP and it
is running on the Zend Platform. We have already ported large sites
over from witango to php, but this was a monster. The interesting part
is that every line of code is written in PHP. There is no perl,
realbasic, java, nothing. Not only that, we are using standard PHP
5.1.6 from CentOS 5.2 distribution, with yum installable modules, like
php-gd, php-xml, php-soap, etc. No pear, no roll your own stuff at
all. We have used a couple of classes to generate excel files, and
things like that, other than that, its all standard php, with the
addition of some features like partial page caching from the Zend
Platform.
In this huge project, I don't think we have run into ONE php bug. I
can't think of a time we had to rewrite code, or create an external
object to make up for a php bug or deficiency. Even all of the
realbasic code that handled the bank and vendor communication is
written in PHP, some scripts being run from command line via cron and
such.
Anyway, I am not trying to sell php, I have no gain there, but as a
developer I am amazed. To make the statement that we have not had one
workaround, is amazing. XML just works, soap just works. The soap
client is amazing, just give it a wsdl and call your method, like 3
lines of code. Many have contacted me if possible to port big projects
over, yes it is.
Anyway, just thought I would share, don't forget to shoot ben a line
if you know him.
Link to new site:
http://www.venue.com/
--
Robert Garcia
President - BigHead Technology
VP Application Development - eventpix.com
13653 West Park Dr
Magalia, Ca 95954
ph: 530.645.4040 x222 fax: 530.645.4040
[EMAIL PROTECTED] - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://bighead.net/ - http://eventpix.com/
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