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Comment by bruceboughton | Hacker News Reader

I'd be interested to hear why they chose PHP. (It's not exactly the framework-du-jour, so they must have positively chosen it).

Also, it seems to me that the web page serving would be the most trivial part of iPlayer. Scaling the video and recommendation database is probably a more interesting topic.

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Shocking to hear that someone has chosen a tool based on its merits rather than how fashionable it is...

Exactly the way I felt!

Indeed. That's why I was asking for what reasons they chose PHP, i.e. what do they perceive it's merits to be.

You might want to read aboout how web infrastructure works at the BBC: http://iamseb.com/seb/2007/12/perl-on-rails-why-the-bbc-fail...

I'd point out that the "perl+SSI" codebase was actually mod_perl, Catalyst, DBIx::Class etc. using SSI as a sort of primitive ESI replacement to ease caching of partial pages.

The strange politics that led to the perl on rails monstrosity apparently aren't universal.

One reason might be the ability to hire quality developers in sufficient numbers. The BBC is big, with developers (both internal BBC and external contracts) working all over the UK on a wide range of output.

and any good developer can pick up and be proficient in PHP quickly

which is in my opinion PHP's greatest strength and greatest weakness. Weakness because not-so-good developers think they are good while writing code using register globals, no input validation, no escaping output, etc..

That's what I was thinking. Ruby, Perl and Python are all fine alternatives if you can find people with those skills.

... or train them.

It's possible that somebody higher up with an enterprisey mindset just signed a deal with Zend. Including paid support and whatnot.

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