How to Scale a Mobile App?

If the hope of any Web App is to scale, why are some companies still starting out with PHP?

• I read a recent example of the evolution of Tumblr. They started as a LAMP shop, developing the initial site in PHP. When scaling they got rid of PHP and moved to a better technology stack built around Scala + JVM. This isn't the first example I"ve seen where a company builds an initial version of an web app in PHP and then moves to something else. How is PHP still even a first choice for building a 1.0 app? Is it an education issue? Is it the talent pool? I'm thinking it's mostly the former. The founder may be contracting out 1.0 isn't technical enough to understand why PHP is bad so ends up hiring a PHP shop which can bang something out quickly.

• Answer:

  Getting your product out asap is more important than scalability in the early stage of a startup. If you are familiar with PHP, there is no good reason for you to start learning Scala and getting used to its frameworks and libraries. Unfortunately most startups fail before they have to worry about scaling. Also Tumblr was founded in 2007. At that time, PHP was more prevalent than today's dominant web dev languages like Ruby or Python.