Conversely, the damage done to PHP’s reputation by the thousands of amateurs who get paid to code with it is frustrating, to say the least.

Either way, this article is litle other than conjecture and bias. But it got us talking right enough.

The bad points..

No Threading..
Poor Class syntax ..
Security..
No Easy to use widely adopted framework (e.g. like Ruby on Rails)

Never underestimate a quick learning curve. If you do this then you attract the masses and you satisfy the techies with hidden but available powerful options. PHP does this pretty well currently.

So will PHP’s popularity wane? I think it soley depends on an external group creating a really good framework to go with the next relase of PHP i.e. PHP6 ..

PHP 5 has been largely ignored.

At this moment in time I’m going to have a look at .NET so I can decide what my next application is developed in. So I think PHP needs to make a move soon or it does risk losing a chunk of its developers.

At the moment .NET appears to be more proactive in its development which makes it hard to ignore.

Ruby is slow, doesn’t scale (no virtual machine, no threading), solutions for deployment look very hackish and fragile (separate ruby-only server with a fixed pool of processes and Apache running as a proxy and serving static content? no, thanks, I want my interpreter integrated in apache, working seamlessly with my MPM of choice), but it looks good (well, if you don’t mind the abuse of punctuation) and benefits from the Church of Rails’ marketing, so it might acquire enough brainpower to get over its problems.

As far as PHP goes, I hope we’ll see more of them brain dead hosts supporting PHP 5. I’ve been coding PHP for about 6 years now, and in time I got to the conclusion that it pretty much sucks at anything non-trivial (lacks proper overloading for functions and methods, operator overloading, incompatibilities between minor versions - it is totally unacceptable for applications to break when moving from 5.1 to 5.2 -, no unicode support, and so on…), so it’s good that alternatives are starting to pop up. Its greatest strength, though, is the solid web server integration, done with acceptable speed (Python is much faster in this aspect, PHP seems to let some stuff for the Zend accelerator to handle), and the ability to use it both for code and templating (something which python lacks), so it won’t die that easily. And there is, of course, the fact that many start with PHP, it causes them brain damage and they can’t move on :P

As for AJAX, it’s about time to lose the hype and start finding out what’s it actually good for :D.

AJAX will lose its glamorous pedestal and the world will realize it is just another tool in the box.

I’m pretty much of the same opinion on this. AJAX is starting to remind me of how Flash was back in the day.

Over used, misused and a hindrance to users at times.

It’s a great tool but has to be used appropriately in order for its real benefits to be realised.

If put together a blog post on my site with further discussion - http://www.andrew-banks.co.uk/index.php/industry/is-ajax-the-new-flash

For web applications, Perl even used to be far more popular than PHP, and perhaps Ruby will take over that position in a few years.

If you’re a student, you generally don’t have alot of money so if you want to get into the industry you try to learn whatever is most cost effective and PHP is that technology. Not everyone can afford Windows based hosting, so there lies a market in itself and therefore it will always have it’s place within the industry.

As I said in my first comment (seems to have been ignored pretty well), a lot of work was put into PHP 6. There have been meetings held months (or even a year) ago with the team to discuss what needs to change in future versions. I already summed up a bit what’s going to come in v6. Also, some changes in 5.2 such as ext/filter have started some discussions about whether it’s a good idea. So the situation has certainly become much better than years ago when register_globals was implemented and nobody wondered whether it was a good idea after all (it wouldn’t have been still in there nowadays if anybody did).

The statement that only four or five web applications written in PHP keep the language alive is really untrue. PHP has turned popular because it is very easy to learn, there are lots of tutorials on the Internet, even more than there are Python plus Ruby tutorials combined (not saying that all PHP tutorials are good though) plus indeed a number of applications such as phpBB which have made it popular. I don’t see what would be wrong with this, since Ruby itself has existed since the nineties but only turned popular thanks to one application/framework (RoR). You could state as well that when RoR disappears Ruby will also be a dead language… (it would certainly have a big impact, though, since many Ruby applications are RoR based).

To continue about PHP, from all the people I know that use PHP there is probably only upto 10 % who actually uses Wordpress or phpBB or Joomla!, etc. It’s certainly not a handful of applications which keep people using PHP. Even if it would, Wordpress, phpBB, Joomla! and others are still (very) actively developed and have all created a big community.

So, to conclude with, I would like to recommend you to check your sources better and read what people say in the comments, instead of continuing to rant and ignore people. I’m not against .NET at all (even going to use it within two months), but spreading nonsense about others just isn’t acceptable. I thought SitePoint was more trustworthy than this.

The comment was more aimed at Flash than Flex. The basic issue is that these “rich internet applications” really should be taking off. But the tool support is lacking significantly. Flex is stil the first of it’s kind, and the pricing puts many people off. $6-$20k for a server is a hard sell when you can get to largely the same place–that is passing data to your rich internet app–with plain ole .NET.

Anyhow, the main issues is that the Flash IDE is completely geared towards the design, not the development end of things. The code editor is primitive at best. It generally makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Wheras WPF/E one can use Visual Studio for the coding bits and the Expression products for the visual bits–a kind of best of both worlds. It will go far in encouraging new projects to take up WPF/E over Flash.

My hope/dream is that some parts of the rather slick Flex IDE filter into the basic Flash IDE. As there are alot more people building Flash-based RIAs than Flash/Flex based RIAs, so that making applications in Flash is not so painful.

BTW, I must say the concept of using Eclipse as the basis for the editor was brilliant, and I hope to see more companies build in that great base.

On PHP:

Actually, PHP’s demise has little or nothing to do with .NET and more to do with the project itself. It has never had any central planning or much effective guidance. And it shows in the massive amount of fundamental issues that the language/framework/whatever has. Now, some folks like things like that. But many don’t.

Now that we are seeing some viable competitors in that space (free, open-source, scripted), we are going to start to see it fall into decline. The only thing keeping it afloat is the combination of WordPress, PHPBB, PHPNuke and Joomla. Allowing alot of people to run fancy sites on cheap shared hosting without ever knowing a lick of php. As soon as viable competitors to these systems take shape, we will start to see PHP’s popularity wane.

@Alex: Herndon, eh? Let me know if you need a hard drive swapped, I am about 15 miles away. Anyhow, it seems that the blogging bits are set on Aussie time–they are 13 or so hours ahead of me.