NYCPHP Meetup

[Hans Zaunere]

> A followup on yesterdays's article on PHP, Perl & Python. Looks like
> Zend has been put very much on the defensive...
> 
> Is the web's love affair with PHP over?
> By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco
> Published Thursday 4th August 2005 22:39 GMT
> 
> 
> If Evans Data Corp (EDC) is to believed, then some big names in
> enterprise systems have been rash in their support for open source scripting
> language PHP. 
> 
> This last eight months saw Intel, SAP, Oracle and IBM all support PHP,
> with investments or product backing through partnerships with PHP king Zend
> Technologies. 
> 
> 
> However, EDC's survey has found PHP, along with scripting cousins Perl
> and Python, is seeing drastically reduced adoption among developers in
> Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Use of PHP has dropped by a
> quarter in EMEA during the last 12 months to just under 28 per cent
> while 40 per cent of developers said they have no plans to evaluate or use
> PHP. 
> 
> The EMEA numbers are a microcosm of a global trend, according to EDC.
> Adoption of PHP is slowing in North America and slamming to a stop in Asia
> Pacific. 
> 
> EDC believes PHP's recent glorious past is over, as customers spend
> money on "more important" technologies to build mission
> critical systems
> and vendors like Microsoft and Sun Microsystems make more of
> a concerted
> marketing push around alternatives such as ASP.NET and
> JavaServer Pages
> (JSP).
> 
> EDC chief operating officer John Andrew told The Register: "There are
> some alternatives that are better promoted and packaged, and
> people are
> turning to those."
> 
> Zend disputes EDC's figures with its own pro-PHP figures and dismisses
> the view that Intel, SAP, Oracle and IBM placed bets on what
> is turning
> into an ephemeral developer strategy. Zend claims the number
> of monthly
> downloads of its Zend integrated development environment (IDE) today
> number 20,000, up from 5,000 in September 2004, with an accompanying
> 150% growth in the privately held company's revenue. Furthermore, Zend is
> opening offices worldwide. 
> 
> As for stats, Zend points to Netcraft who claims 22m internet domains
> use PHP, making it the internet's most popular scripting language.
> 
> "Microsoft is interested in PHP - the next version of IIS is going to
> support PHP. If there was no interest, or we were seeing a decline of
> interest in PHP, why would they get their product to support
> PHP?" asked
> Zend vice president of marketing Michel Gerin.
> 
> Furthermore, while EDC maintains PHP is not seeing "serious" deployment,
> Zend claims changes to the language like the addition of Object
> Orientation (OO) in PHP 5.0 mean the language is going beyond pure web
> site development and into the enterprise as an alternative to
> Java and C
> ++.
> 
> There-in, though, could lay a problem. If Java developers are indeed
> picking-up PHP because - like almost anything else it seems - it is
> simpler to use than Java, then it will hit the marketing wall of Sun,
> BEA Systems, Borland, IBM and Oracle who either deliver serious Java
> development tools or application servers. On C++, PHP must largely
> contend with Microsoft's Goliath-like Visual Studio.
> 
> Idol curiosity could have accounted for the PHP spike EDC
> identified two
> years ago as large numbers of developers planned to evaluate or adopt
> PHP. When it came to using PHP, though, that's where
> developers probably
> turned to their familiar tools.
> 
> While adoption may be slowing, PHP is not going away. With an estimated
> 2.5m PHP developers and web sites going up on a daily basis that have
> been built using PHP, the language is firmly ensconced in computing's
> landscape. The only question seems to be: how deep can PHP go in business
> computing? 
> 
> The decision by IBM and Oracle to provide native support for PHP in
> their databases proves they have recognized PHP's ability to
> harm their
> core businesses, and their desire to avert any problems by
> winning over
> PHP developers. According to Gerin, IBM and Oracle want to ensure PHP
> developers develop applications and web sites that use their databases
> and not "PHP-optimized" databases like MySQL. "They want to be part of the
> game," Gerin said. 
> 
> Andrew agrees that the big vendors are just keeping their
> options open.
> "I don't think PHP is going to go away fast - they have a
> large share of
> the market. Most of those suppliers have to remain open to
> multiple ways
> to be friendly," he said.
> 
> If EDC is right, then the real problem is not for the tier one vendors
> who have deep pockets and multi-platform support to ride out any
> tactical snafu, but an emerging class of start-ups betting their
> business on LAMP. Companies like SpikeSource and SourceLabs plan to
> provide certification and testing for business software in the Linux,
> Apache, MySQL and Perl/Python/PHP (LAMP) stack. But, what
> happens if the
> "P" part of the stack is losing developers and evaporates?
> 
> Andrew is confidant LAMP will adapt, and other open source languages
> will take the place of PHP. "[LAMP] was intended to be interchangeable -
> that's the beauty of it. That's the beauty of open standards and open
> source," he said.