I got into a discussion on Twitter the other day where I mentioned that I don’t like DI. Call it lack of sleep or language barrier (on my part), but I said DI — dependency injection — when I meant the dependency injection container. Having said this, let me explain why I don’t like it.

POV

Despite not working for any of the larger PHP joints out there, I get to spend my time with pretty interesting stuff. I wouldn’t call it high traffic or big data, but being in the Top 100 websites, we’re certainly not the average PHP application out there.

I’ve shared some numbers perviously, and also in our job posting — don’t mean to compare size, but my perspective is just that.

Looking at anything, I’m compelled to ask myself:

  • How much time will it save during development?
  • How much time will take to educate my team?
  • How much time will it eat away in each request?
  • How much time will it cost me to rip it out when it’s slow?

Yeah, I’m still crazy about technology, but I’ve also grown up to not just submit to any of it without thorough evaluation. In that respect, I’ve grown old(er) — but that’s (IMHO) healthy sceptism and usually what people call experience.

Hype

At the expense of my own credibility, let me just say (again) that I’m not particulary against new things. My beef is the hype.

The fact is that we use a lot of new technology and I have to admit that it’s pretty exciting for me when to try out new things. Trying out doesn’t mean that we end up using it, but when we try out we take a close look.

On the newer side of things we ended up using CouchDB, Redis, Membase and ElasticSearch. On one or two of these we have even started hacking and all in all we follow their development closely.

Telling people about what we run, sometimes feels like I run a playground for developers and crazy-about-tech people. It’s new and it’s bleeding edge, and it may be true to a certain extend, but it also the opposite because we (believe we) found great use-cases for each of these things.

But getting back to patterns, and I believe these prove my point even better than going on about these databases: Be honest to yourself and let’s define “new” in this case and in general. Because neither dependency injection nor containers, or NoSQL are exactly new.

I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but get real — it’s been said and done before.