I saw this news few days ago on the Indexel french IT news site, and no doubt that the French AFUP association is making great effort in france to make PHP more popular specially for professionals.
By choosing PHP, groupe Girard divided by ten the development time of its ERP software which using more than 400 screen. The maintenance is also much more easy. Explained Valentin Moyano, IT Director of the groupe.
Le Groupe Gerard is an european leader in furniture transportation. Created in 1961, this company of 1 000 people realizes nearly 100 million euros of sales turnover. It has more than 450 vehicles transporting 1,3 million cubic meters of pieces of furniture per year, from Portugal to Scandinavia.
PHP, a very permissive language
It retains J2EE platform and form several collaborators of the IT team in Java and UML. But very quickly, this technology does not convince it. “We did not manage to quickly provide models to the users, the developments appeared complex to us, without counting the hours spent to include/understand subtleties of the standard”, explains Valentine Moyano. It thus decides to give up J2EE for the PHP-MySQL couple, which seemed to him better adapted in terms of reliability, cost and flexibility of development. “However, to have already practised it, we knew that PHP is a very permissive language. We were thus pressed on PHP-Pro of Sodifrance “, the IT manager explains.
This offer includes service (expression of the needs), a framework PHP based on reusable components which simplify and tally the developments, and a generator of code which exploits descriptions of the functional needs to generate more than 80 % of the application.
The development time divided by ten
“PHP Pro based on an iterative method of development and allowed us to reduce by ten the time of development on the heaviest modules of the application”, estimates Bruno David, Harmony project manager. Begun in May 2005, the first phase of the project required 1 200 day-man of development to produce more than 300 screens (modules management customers, invoicing, physical management of the transported products, etc).
The first modules give whole satisfaction to the 200 direct users divided on six sites and to the 350 drivers who reach it via a mobile phone. “Logical! In a cycle of traditional development, the developers devote 70 % of their time to the technical aspects and only 30 % with the listening of the users. With PHP-Pro, we reversed these proportions. We thus have a much better comprehension of their functional needs, which with final enables us to gain in productivity “, estimates Valentine Moyano.
For the Girard group, the contribution of a framework PHP is not limited to the shortening of the delivery periods of the project. “Thanks to this structured step, our engineers can intervene on any part of the application because the entirety of the code respects quality standards independently of the engineer who developed it”, Valentine Moyano indicates.
What makes it possible to reduce the load of maintenance drastiquement. “We noted a saving of time even more significant than that of which we profited during the developments”, notes the IT Director of the Groupe Girard. Six months after launching of the project and vis-a-vis the success of the first deployments, the Groupe Girard already extended the functional perimeter of Harmony and account to buckle one second phase at the beginning of 2006.
