What Other Technologies Complement PHP?

[JimBadger]

I'm part of a team developing a PHP browser game, and I was just wondering if there are any other technologies, languages, or other random "things" that work well with PHP...in a sense of helping to deliver a more whizzy (and/or robust*) experience for the user?

The question might be a little vague, I don't know! 🙂

I say and/or as anything you mention doesn't have to be both whizzy and robust, it can be either!

And by robust I guess I'm talking about front and back-end security (using MySQL for the time being).

I'd just be interested to see what people come up with.

Thanks,
James

[NogDog]

Robust: a DBMS such as MySQL or PostgreSQL.

Whizzy: AJAX (a way of using JavaScript in conjunction with server-side code such as PHP)

Robust: honing your object-oriented programming skills and using an OOP framework such as CodeIgniter, Zend, CakePHP, Symfony, etc.

[Ashley_Sheridan]

PHP is primarily a web language, and as such, works well with the usual suspects. Like NogDog said, database of most kinds can be made to interface with PHP, and I find MySQL to work particularly well, especially when you can manage the database with something like phpMyAdmin.

PHP works well with images and you can use it to create all the typical web-based image formats (jpg, gif & png) PDF's can be created and, to a lesser extent, manipulated and working with XML is quite simple now, so working with AJAX based content is easy.

Also, if there's a unique requirement you have that PHP won't do out of the box, it can interact with the operating systems shell to trigger scripts written in other languages. I find a Linux operating system better for this, because tools for working with these other languages are more readily available.

[JimBadger]

Thanks, both. I'll start reading up on the things mentioned!