Probably the most underestimated aspect of a website or online application is the development that goes into ensuring the efficiency and accuracy of the business logic powering the system. We take great pride in that we only take on the most challenging, and therefore rewarding, projects. As such, every aspect of the solutions we engineer, require complex, flexible and extensible implementation.

Although we do work within other programming environments, we specialize in PHP development. This language is an open source, global phenomenon, which has fast become one of the most widely used technologies in the online world. The importance of the fact that it is open source may be surprising to many potential clients. Basically this means that it is free to use, so not only are there no overhead licensing costs, but in turn PHP is most effective if implemented within an entirely open source environment.

Alongside, or rather as a layer above PHP, we use a framework called Symfony. This provides us with a highly extensible, incredibly powerful development environment, allowing us to continually and efficiently upgrade, enhance and maintain the system we develop.

We have taken great pains to select the best possible development tools and our clients have consistently benefited from these decisions. However, we will never stop learning and evolving, and neither will the technologies we promote. It is our goal to remain dynamic, to always use the best possible instruments to ensure that everything we produce is as fluid and powerful as a truly orchestral Symfony could ever be.

PHP, then Personal Home Page, was conceived in 1994 by the Danish developer, Rasmus Lerdorf. Back then it was a simple set of C programmed interfaces built to replace the Perl scripts Rasmus used to assist in maintaining his own website. After combining his original work with a custom Form Interpreter and adding some initial database support, he released PHP/FI publicly in 1995.

It wasn't until 1997 that Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the parser and renamed the language using the recursive acronym PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. Following their release of PHP/FI 2 in the same year, community testing of PHP 3 began and the two developers started work on a complete rebuild of the PHP Core resulting in the creation of the Zend Engine, and the founding of Zend Technologies. PHP 4, powered by the first commercial incarnation of the Zend Engine, was released in May 2000 and remained under constant development and improvement until 2008.

In 2004, however, PHP 5 was finally released, powered by the Zend Engine II and providing highly evolved functionality. PHP had become largely Object Oriented, had achieved significantly improved database support and had effectively matured into the programming language we use today.

Thanks to the GoPHP5 community initiative, PHP 4 was effectively made redundant and the path was set for the continued advancement of what had grown into one of the most widely used online engineering technologies. Today, PHP is fast heading towards its sixth version, and another extensive increase in performance and functionality. Fueled by its open-source architecture and its tireless supporters it continues to be the best option for spectacular web development.

With over 20 million domains (Netcraft) recognized as implementations of PHP and continual growth in global interest, PHP is now considered the 4th most popular programming language in the world (TIOBE), and that includes application programming languages like C and C++ with no web presence to speak of.

Today, the language is maintained, developed and distributed by The PHP Group, but considering that it is an open-source venture, they do rely heavily on the assistance and donations of many other organizations. Among these are some considerably notable companies: IBM provides extensive testing support and has even donated invaluable hardware to the project; Microsoft has supplied programmers and more to assist with Windows implementation of the language and the required global support; Sun Microsystems have dedicated staff to PHP specific Solaris and MySQL initiatives; Yahoo! allows their staff to put considerable time into aiding the development of the language; Zend, while no longer running the show, still offer resources, along with Oracle, Digg and Facebook, to maintain and improve the core; and while they may not be particularly well known, there are a multitude of hosting companies providing vital mirroring services and many essential small companies donating and applying their own resources to help make PHP better and better.