1 PHP is the fastest growing server-side technology

PHP is the fastest growing server-side technology (source: Netcraft). According to a Netcraft survey published in April 2002, PHP is now installed on over 24% of all sites on the Internet. Of the 37.6 million web sites reported worldwide, PHP is running on over 9 million sites and continues to grow at a rapid rate. Over the past two years PHP has averaged a 6.5% monthly growth rate, eclipsing the growth of other application serving technologies.

PHP Everywhere (php.weblogs.com) reports the following growth of PHP applications on the web:

      10-12-2000    03-04-2002  Growth  Share

 asp   3,166,710    11,958,185    278%    48%

 PHP     157,470     7,549,230   4694%    30%

 cfm     936,223     4,950,133    429%    20%

 jsp      24,435       413,827   1594%     2%

With popularity comes support, templates and less expensive development resources.

2 PHP reduces hardware and development costs

PHP pages benchmark execute, in general, 3 to 4 times faster than equivalent JSP pages (source: eWeek). The result is reduced hardware expense and better scale for a given hardware platform.

PHP web development has been benchmarked as 2 to 3 times faster than JSP pages for equivalent projects while using equivalent resources (source: PerlMonth). The result is faster time-to-market and less expensive development cycles.

3 PHP is increasingly used by large organizations

Companies looking for less expensive and more reliable web applications are increasingly turning to PHP. PHP is used by the following large organizations:

CapitalOne, NASA, the W3C, Worldcom, Google, Deutsche Bank, Redhat, Lycos, Cisco, Ericsson, Volvo, Motorola, SourceForge, Honda, Xoom, WinAmp, Sony Music, Vodafone, CBS, 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, Columbus Dispatch, Indianapolis Star, Indiana University, Deutsche Telecomm, Bang & Olufsen, Siemens, Unilever, Philips, BMC, NTT, Air Canada, Lufthansa, Dialpad, BMC, Mitsubishi, MP3.com, the Arizona Republic

4 PHP has better community support

Because of PHP's explosive growth, the support community that has grown up with PHP is of surprising size and scale. For instance, Devshed's support forums currently have the following message breakdown:

 Technology   Posts   Threads

 PHP          80009     17478

 Perl          8971      2102

 Java          1537       268

 Python         313       130

5 PHP has superior templates for fast site roll-outs

Content management templates are becoming a dominant force in creating successful web sites. Mimicking Slashdot, kuro5hin and others, "weblog"-style templates have become a staple for successful sites. These templates incorporate news, discussion, polls and other user- friendly features. Primary reasons for their rapid acceptance include the ability to easily manage content, to build sites that can organically grow and to encourage repeat visits. Popular (and free) content management templates in PHP include PostNuke [ http://www.postnuke.com ] and PHPnuke [ http://www.phpnuke.org ].

Discussion boards are key elements of any dynamic site that seeks to attract feedback, heavy usage and a sense of community. Popular PHP discussion boards include phpBB [ http://www.phpbb.com ] and openBB [ http://www.openbb.com ].

PHP-based templates dramatically reduce time-to-market, often have no licensing costs associated with them, scale well and are heavily used and supported.

The case for PHP is compelling. And BadBlue remains the easiest way to get up and running with PHP quickly. And with BadBlue's new ShareOffice library, you can leverage the data in MS Office files in minutes, not days or weeks.