Japanese Web and PHP/symfony

2008-12-08 @ Sensio Labs

Akky Akimoto(秋元裕樹)

Cybozu Labs/Asiajin/Narabe.com, Tokyo, Japan

Agenda

• Self introduction
• Cybozu Who?
• Japanese Web Industory
• PHP/symfony in Japan

Self introduction

three jobs

• In-house blogger for Cybozu Labs (hired, part-time)
• Asiajin (English Blog) co-founder
• Narabe.com (CGM Web2.0) entrepreneur

Why in Paris?

• Official Blogger of Le Web '08

Cybozu Who?

• Independent packaged software vendor (800 people in whole group)
• No.1 Groupware vendor in Japan (leading #2 IBM and #3 Microsoft)
• Enterprise web collaboration package - scheduler, bulletin board, messaging, to do, project management, workflow, web database, etc.
• The main product is built on PHP/MySQL

Groupware Market Share/Japan

1. Cybozu (25.6%)
2. IBM/Lotus (24.7%)
3. Microsoft Exchange (13.1%)

Cybozu Labs?

• Research subsidiary of Cybozu. 3 years old
• "Engineers only" company (12 engineers)
• To make innovation for the next generation product
• open sources: Mosh(Scheme interpreter), Q4M(MySQL queue engine), etc.
• experimental services: Mylingual, Pathtraq, iVoca, Outputz, etc.

Cybozu and Akky

• 2002-2005 director for Cybozu 10-languages localization in San Francisco, USA
• 2005- researcher, then pro-blogger
• kind of evangeling company/products

English blog Asiajin

• Group blog on Japanese Web/IT industory news
• 2400 feed subscribers, 75% of which from outside of Japan
• 1st anniversary

Comparison Charts Community Narabe.com

• "Wikipedia for Comparison Chart"
• Japanese version is so so. No one on English version.
• symfony/PHP5.2/Apache/MySQL/Amazon EC2&S3

Japanese Web Industory

Yahoo! Yahoo! Yahoo!

• Yahoo! Japan is dominating (the world #10 - Alexa)
• Auction (eBay out), Search, Web Mail, News, Shopping, Blog, Q and A, etc.
• Google is far behind (half in search users, far smaller ads sale, #34 - Alexa)
• other Japanese companies

Other big players

• Rakuten (Online shopping mall)
• DeNA (cellphone SNS)
• Mixi (SNS)
• Kakaku.com (price comparison)
• Amazon Japan (online books/shopping)
• Gurunabi (groumet guide)
• Cyber Agent (blog, portal)

PHP and other scripting languages(1)

• PHP - largest userbase, many novices
• Perl - most active around the world
• Ruby - also popular (Ruby is from Japan originally)
• Python - Zope has some users but not so strong
• Java, .NET - almost enterprize only

PHP and other scripting languages(2)

major web services and their main language

• PHP - Yahoo, Rakuten, Niconico Douga, Kakaku.com, Gree, Gurunabi
• Perl - Mixi, livedoor, 2channel, Hatena
• Ruby - Cookpad(, Rakuten)
• Python - ... Google?

cf. Alexa top sites in Japan

PHP in Japan

• mbstring - multibytes handling MUST
• migrating PHP4 to PHP5
• a lot of translation works done. not many reads English documentations

PHP communities

• Japan PHP Users Group
• PHP Conference (annual, 9th year, over 600 attendees )
• study meetings 2,3 times per month, 30-50 people. mainly Tokyo but also in other big cities

PHP frameworks

• Mojavi/Agavi - not active now
• Maple (Japanese) - not active now
• Ethna (Japanese, Gree SNS - #3 Social Network. 887 mil. euro profit)
• Piece Framework (Japanese)
• CodeIgnitor
• CakePHP (Conference at Tokyo with 140 engineers)
• symfony
• Zend Framework

symfony in Japan

• two full books
• symfony Perfect Guide
• symfony x PHP
• also mentioned on some books/magazines (1)
• others CakePHP x 4, Ethna, Zend Framework x 3, Ethna, Code Igniter and over 400 PHP books

symfony in Japan (2)

symfony in Japan (3)

• document translation team (works on Google Docs)
• symfony Camp in 2009?