HipHop for PHP Commercial Implications

So the blogs are a twit­ter and the tubes are get­ting clogged with all the chat about Hio­Hop, well at least in the PHP Com­mu­nity.  The buzz is really not bad con­sid­er­ing that the HipHop trans­la­tor hasn’t even been pub­lished yet (at least at the time of writ­ing it has not been put on github) and there really are a met­ric ton of posts about what it is and what it could mean to the com­mu­nity or not, but one of the things I’ve yet to see addressed are the busi­ness impli­ca­tions of HipHop.  

So, here I am, a PHP devel­oper who has never touched HipHop, what am I doing writ­ing about the busi­ness impli­ca­tions?  Well that’s actu­ally fairly sim­ple, like every other devel­oper in the known world, I have a home busi­ness too (at least I’m try­ing to have one) and one of the things I’ve been play­ing with is the idea of cre­at­ing a sta­tic pack­age to sell has been an inter­est­ing one.  In PHP if you sell a pack­age or library you gen­er­ally deliver either a. a file struc­ture expos­ing every line of PHP writ­ten or b. a mess of files that have been “obfus­cated” or locked through a tool like Zend_Encoder or Ion Cube.  The thing is if you’re want­ing to sell some­thing as closed source, cur­rently it’s not really pos­si­ble to com­pile and send a binary form to the end cus­tomer, well HipHop will be chang­ing that, in ways that we haven’t even really fully thought about or dis­cussed, being able to deliver an exe­cutable with an exposed api (via ser­vices at the very least) rather excites me.  

Beyond the excite­ment to me, this also means more to the com­mu­nity, being able to attract busi­nesses who want to sell a prod­uct will only improve the PHP sup­port in HipHop and drive train­ing in the lan­guage, espe­cially once HipHop sup­ports Win­dows.  One of the other things I’ve been see­ing lately is talk about get­ting HipHop to sup­port run­ning through a fastcgi inter­face, if that’s the case then we could eas­ily run via IIS along­side of ASP.NET, it’ll be inter­est­ing to see what hap­pens in the long-term though because I’m sure there are other impli­ca­tions I haven’t even thought about yet.

Share

Save