Well the year’s almost done. I was planning a look back over 2004 but… time and motivation have failed to coincide.
2004 in short: probably the two most significant events were the release of PHP5 last July and the arrival of Planet PHP, back in January, more as a symbol of blogging becoming mainstream in the PHP community. Otherwise it just kept on storming up that hill.
Update: completely forgot (it’s been a year). There’s Derick’s entertaining (and no doubt controversial) summary to come (thanks for the reminder). As a taster, here’s 2003 and 2002.
Far more fun is taking some wild stabs at 2005…
- With the release of 5.0.6 in… July 2005, PHP5 will start making its presence really felt, rolling its way out to web hosts while better known PHP applications will start taking advantage of PHP5 specific functionality.
- Of the thirteen new reserved words added by PHP5, anecdotal evidence will suggest that no more than half are being used in the real world.
- In January 2005 PHP will win an award as “Programming Language of the Year, 2004″
- The Holy Wars between the dynamic four (Perl, Python, PHP and Ruby) will finally dry up and developers from all four communities will start sharing ideas and looking for ways to interoperate, with the occasional squawked reminder of things to come. Leading into…
- A surprising number of new projects written in other languages that generate PHP, taking advantage of its easy deployment and ever growing installed base plus the fact that it was always a template language anyway.
- PHP will have a small but useful role in building P2P networks.
- The words “PHP” and “security” will be whipped up into a whirlwind between intelligent discussion and FUD, spurred by further worms and PHP fans. The magic number 0644 will prevent the world from ending and ModSecurity will start making the rounds of web hosts. Meanwhile efforts will be directed towards PHP source code analysis tools and the average PHP salary will increase…
- Another PHP-powered hit will have the “(ad)justify my salary” crowd talking about the “new” paradigm: a RESTy, SOAy, dynamicy, touchy, feely kinda of a thing; rich-but-thin and with nice, soft edges. Real work will continue regardless.
- At least one well known PHP application will spring a back-end administration interface rendered entirely with XUL. Another will spring a Firefox extension.
- Google will wrap their Firefox homepage in XUL.
- Javascript will start to be taken seriously by many.
- Your mother will offer you her opinion on a Firefox extension you hadn’t even heard of.
I seem to have wandered off PHP there. Is anyone willing to offer some (more daring) predictions? Otherwise, happy new year for tomorrow night.
December 30th, 2004 at 10:36 am
A look back is my work, almost done ;-)
December 30th, 2004 at 11:03 am
Happy NY, Harry! Your blog is the most amazing I’ve ever read :)
December 30th, 2004 at 11:31 am
* SimpleTest will release both version 1.0 and SimpleTest2 (for PHP5)
* WACT will go beta
* Jason will publish a book on Design Patterns
* some Job postings will begin requiring Zend Certification
* congress will pass a law banning recursive acronyms as “too confusing” and PHP will have to be renamed
December 30th, 2004 at 11:32 am
- Firefox gets SVG1.2 support.. with either RCC or sXBL support. (hopefully.. )
- Google will create an funky SVG homepage creating graphs for search results.
- XUL gets consigned to the technology dustbin, and just used for some firefox plugins. Sorry, just can’t see it going anywhere, especially if the mono project pick up XAML. Pretty sure it’ll have better documentation, which is a decider for me.
December 30th, 2004 at 12:35 pm
Very interesting and fun. Better defined as “educated guesses” than “daring predictions.” Soothsayer, psychic, or fortune-teller? Naw. Informed Advisor, very much so.
Happy New Year!
December 30th, 2004 at 1:23 pm
i welcome the wage increase if nothing more :D a good new year to you harry btw, let the drink flow i say…
December 30th, 2004 at 5:29 pm
Derick I’m looking forward to your lookback :)
December 30th, 2004 at 6:22 pm
Microsoft will start programming Internet Explorer 7 in PHP-GTK!
ok maybe not =P
December 31st, 2004 at 8:04 am
Php Frameworks and CMS devs will start working together to provide complete GPL applications with lot of doc and tutorials ;o)
Pear will start to write php5 updates
December 31st, 2004 at 8:39 am
Microsoft will try to buy PHP in its own I want to buy the competition race. >:[
Now, seriously:
Agree 100%
December 31st, 2004 at 11:17 am
Enterprise level integration into PHP, I don’t see this forthcoming, but its worth throwing into the mix.
January 1st, 2005 at 7:51 am
Hosts will begin to upgrade to PHP5, and users of popular PHP applications will start complaining that their PHP4 scripts aren’t compatible with PHP5 ;)
January 1st, 2005 at 10:47 am
* I agree with Dean, hosts will give into upgrading to PHP5 (At long last)
* More people will migrate over from MySQL to PostgreSQL and SQLLite
* Marcus and Jason will finish their PHP books
* PHP will start getting used more outside it’s normal “web application” use. i.e. PHP GTK and maybe work might resume on the PHP SDL extension (it would be nice to see some oldskool arcade games written in PHP!)
January 1st, 2005 at 2:40 pm
* More hosts consider PHP5 “proven” and upgrade.
* Corp. websites will start using PHP ;-)
* More hosts will offer PostgreSQL in addition to MySQL.
January 3rd, 2005 at 9:25 am
SOAy work WILL BE “real work” by mid-2005, PHP developers will actively encourage and promote the development of Web Services features into PHP.
January 3rd, 2005 at 1:34 pm
My prediction is that PHP will lose a loyal user as I’m switching to Rails since there are still no good framework in sight… unfortunately!
November 12th, 2005 at 11:40 am
my prediction is that there will be a great IDE and PHP framework initiative for 2006 ;-)