Overview for
legacy
PHP has been around for a long time. During it's twenty year tenure of powering the web it has been used for a lot of things. PHP has been and continues to power a lot of ad-hoc, disposable web applications and quick turn around web sites.
In addition to this bulk of CMS work and quick hacks, PHP powers a lot of business critical applications. These tend to grow in complexity over time and many of these are 10+ years in age. As a language PHP has also matured along the way.
Today it is a perfectly viable option to gradually rewrite your application in modern PHP without the risky big bang rewrite. In fact, PHP is pretty much a perfect tool for this.
Written by Jani Tarvainen on Sunday September 20, 2015
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Tags:
symfony, php, cms, legacy
I wrote about legacy and developers earlier today. I accidentally ended up having this pairing of words on there: Corporate Legacy
That's a pair that devs loathe by nature, but it made me think. Where was I coming from and what kind of legacy have I left? In this short time scale technology evolves, but humans don't. Certain patterns repeat.
Written by Jani Tarvainen on Sunday September 6, 2015
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Tags:
business, opensource, legacy
The word legacy in the IT word almost exclusively negative connotations. Out of that context it is used more diversely. Consider the legacy left by individuals and organisations such Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Michael Jackson and the Greek and Roman Empires. The forementioned empires shed a lot of blood and caused misery, but they continue to live in our everyday lives after thousands of years. That is the power of legacy.
You can have good and bad legacy in IT as well. You could say that Windows ME was built on bad legacy where as Mac OS X was started on good legacy. But all of these have history behind them, just as the code you write today will have in the future. Most of your code is likely disposable, but it's still worth considering the legacy you leave.
