Interview: Andrei: Zmievski

Marc: How do you come to php, what are your IT roots? Andrei: I grew up in Russia, and we didn't quite have access to the same kind of computers that Western kids did. I started programming when I was about 10 or 11, using one of those programmable calculators, then graduating to more advanced machines like Timex Sinclair. When I was 13, I had a summer job developing apps based on dBase IV and FoxPro. Then a couple of years later I came to USA to study and started catching up on all I've been missing. I taught myself C and had fun programming all kinds of little graphics apps and plugins. It wasn't until I got a university Internet account that I found out about the wonderful world of Unix. To make the long story short, I started working at ispi while I was still in college, but we didn't use PHP until about 3 years ago when we saw that the vendor who provided most of our technology base just didn't want to innovate. So, we evaluated PHP as best as we could because it was going to be a big switch for us, and one of the deciding factors was that we had access to source code and could implement custom functions and all that wondeful stuff. But when I started using PHP (version 3.0.5 I believe), some of the things were literally driving me mad (lack of good array functions, for one), so it was like, "Okay, there's no way to import array into symbol table, let's write it". Then Rasmus suggested I work on WDDX stuff and so on. Marc: Its hard to count your projects within the php community, how did you manage all that? (Just to mention a few: smarty, php-gtk, various functions in php like wddx) Andrei: Well, most of it grew out of pure necessity (except for PHP-GTK). I couldn't stand using POSIX regexps, so PCRE was born. WDDX was initially just a way to make PHP be on par with other languages supporting the protocol, but it turned out to be really useful for our internal applications as well. All of the apps our company makes are template-based, and since we weren't satisfied with any of the existing template solutions, we had to invent Smarty. The only justification for PHP-GTK, though, was "why not?" or "because we can", but I guess I have to amend it now that it's really finding its uses. As far as how I manage to keep working on all this stuff, well, sometimes it gets tough and I don't feel like doing anything, but then I just read a new book or go biking and by the time I'm done, there is a new pool of energy. Plus with all the support I've received from the wonderful PHP community I get inspired to do more and more. Marc: What is your opinion about server side Java like servlets and the whole J2EE stuff? Andrei: George Bush probably knows more about J2EE than I do, but as far as Java servlets, I guess to each his own. I don't use Java because it doesn't quite let me do rapid development like PHP does. And it's too complicated (I know I will get flack for saying this). Marc: What can we expect of the new Zend 2.0 Engine which is still in development? Andrei: The main concentration of 2.0 will be on overhauling the object handling system, not so much externally, as internally. All the objects will be passed around by reference using object handles, thus avoiding a lot of messy stuff that the current engine has to do. But there will be a few user-visible change as well: destructors, unified constructors, static member variables, exception handling, and other things mentioned in the draft PDF. I personally hope for a much improved (but really misnamed) object overloading support, since PHP-GTK has uncovered quite a few shortcomings of it. Marc: What is your development operating system and what are your favourite languages? Andrei: I use RedHat Linux. It's been good to me. Favorite languages, C of course, Python. Perl has some interesting stuff when I can wrap my head around its obscure syntax. I'd like to learn more about Scheme/Lisp if time permits. C# looks promising, but I'll reserve my judgement until I am more familiar with it. Marc: Do you have some idols [people you respect] in the it business or linux community? Andrei: I won't single out anybody, because I respect all the people who contribute their time and effort to all the open source projects around. That said, I wouldn't mind meeting Dr. James Clark, founder of SGI and Netscape. Marc: Do you believe open source can be an alternative to the "common" business? Whats your feeling about open source in general? Andrei: From a purely idealistic point of view, yes, I sure hope it can be. But looking at the past several years, we have had very few so-called open source companies who were even moderately successful (read profitable). I don't claim to know why or why not, but the current model of commercial software is pretty well entrenched and it will be hard to make any sort of dent in its marketshare. Sure, Apache is the most popular web server around, but linux hasn't really grabbed any significant share of the desktop market. Perhaps, some different business models are necessary. Marc: What do you do, if you are not in front of a computer? Andrei: I am usually pacing around it trying to solve some sort of really hard problem. :) Nah, usually I go biking or do weight-lifting.. I love reading, so you can often find me with a science fiction, historical, or techno-thriller novel in hand. I also try to get better at playing piano, but I need to be more diligent at that. Marc: What technologies are on fire in the next months? Andrei: If I knew that, I'd be on Datek right now, buying up shares of the companies responsible for those technologies. :) I think wireless is cool, though. But it will need to have a totally different usage paradigm to really take off -- currently, it's just glorified web browsing. Marc: What is special about the php community? Why do you like php so much? Andrei: Well, since PHP has the best features of C, Perl (cough), and Java (double cough), people can very easily migrate from those languages. They get really seduced by the richness of functions and extensions that PHP offers and just its general ease of development. Plus the support is top-notch. This is a community of people with very diverse backgrounds, and so we have this very eclectic group of people that one can learn lots from. Kind of like PHP. I like PHP for all those reasons and also because it gives me a challenge to work on things that it doesn't have yet.       Andrei Zmievski, thank you for your time and best wishes for the future.