Netcraft reports that by the end of October, PHP was running on 6,624,340 domains and 979,572 unique IP addresses. PHP is thus running on nearly one quarter of all servers on the web. It is the fastest growing server-side language.

Most interesting is the news that more and more large companies are adopting PHP.

Some of the compelling reasons: multi-platform support; free licensing for most PHP-related technologies; raw 3x to 4x performance advantage over JSP (source: eWeek) which translates directly to hardware savings; 2x to 5x development time advantage over JSP (source: PerlMonth) which translates directly to software development resource savings; integrates with Java EJBs and servlets, as well as Oracle, SQL Server, LDAP, SOAP, XML-RPC and XML (with both SAX and DOM support).

Another great aspect is the support communities that have arisen around PHP. Discussion board software, content management templates, etc. are also freely available and very robust. Large organizations running PHP include:

MCI/Worldcom, Dialpad, Google, Mitsubishi, Redhat, MP3.com, Lycos, Ericsson, Volvo, NASA, the W3C, SourceForge, Honda, Xoom, WinAmp, Sony Music, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, the US Army, UPI, the New York Yankees, Southwestern Bell, the San Diego Zoo, the Oakland Raiders, Audi, Subaru, VA Linux, Winamp, Duke University, Quicken, The Village Voice, Undernet, Access Micro

Many users call BadBlue "the easiest personal web server for running PHP". If you'd like to see for yourself, get the free BadBlue Personal Edition download and discover how BadBlue can be installed and running PHP in a matter of seconds (really! :-):

Read more about Getting started with BadBlue and PHP.

BadBlue integrates a complete, powerful scheduler that can capture web pages, run PHP scripts and execute Windows commands on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis. Scheduling is controlled through the EXT.INI configuration file and is extremely easy to use.

Get the details on scheduling