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My ‘day job’ has nothing to do with PHP. It has nothing to do with any form of programming. I graduated in 2006 with a degree in Biochemistry and went on to do a MSc and now PhD in cardiovascular biology. The closest most of my colleagues come to programming is a formula in an Excel spreadsheet.

It was actually Excel which prompted this post. Yesterday I was analysing some data and bemoaning the poor search functionality that Excel makes available. I had already expanded the small set of experimental data I had with some values pulled from a web service using a quickly hacked together PHP script and it got me to wondering how much better things could be if I just stuck with PHP.

Where’s the science?

This train of thought led on to whether PHP has been used all that often for scientific projects. There is an accelerating trend in Biology to make data and tools available via web interfaces. In my opinion this is an environment where PHP excels and yet all the literature I’ve seen discussing the development of these services uses Perl or occasionally Java.

Searching a little harder for PHP projects yields an equally depressing outlook. In PEAR Jesus Castagnetto released the Science_Chemistry and Math_Stats packages back in 2003. For my purposes though the Chemistry package is a little too ‘chemical’ and the stats package is a little too basic. In sourceforge there is a package named BioPHP which looks promising but again there has been no activity since 2003. A lot has happened since then.

Biology is increasingly data generative. There is going to be a steadily increasing need for tools to analyse all this data. These are likely to be centralised and made available via web interfaces.

Anyone out there?

I suspect I’m going to be increasingly creating automated solutions to remove some of the repetition involved in processing the, relatively, small amounts of data that I generate. A PHP toolkit able to leverage the latest online databases and perform ‘advanced’ statistics would be immensely valuable.

So my question is this. Is anyone out there using PHP in a scientific environment? Are there resources available which I’ve missed?

Cpanel, one of the leading providers of control panels for Linux and FreeBSD web hosting servers has announced that it would be releasing a beta version of a new Cpanel Server Suite that would be its first Microsoft Windows Server® 2008-based product line.

A Slashbot job advert seems to suggest that Cpanel is recruiting Windows application developers for this new venture.

Cpanel has been working on this Windows version for some time now. The only difference this time is that they are re-staffing and commiting more time and resources to it. Cpanel is expecting to release the beta version of the product on December 15th 2007 and have the production release available by March 30th 2008.

A press release by Microsoft quotes cPanel CEO J. Nick Koston as saying:

“Microsoft has shown a strong commitment to the hosting industry over the past several years. cPanel’s Windows development team feels that IIS7 offers a robust, high-performance Web server with increased security that the industry will quickly adopt. Microsoft Server 2008 and IIS7 with its modern architecture and support for legacy products was the natural starting point for our expanded product offering.”