Is the web's love affair with PHP over? Is LAMP going limp?

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...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/04/php_evans/

Are There Enough Bodies to Satisfy PHP's Love Affair?

There is no doubt that PHP has a place in the enterprise. PHP provides a good way of developing interactive HTML user interfaces, be it for a small business or a large one like Lufthansa, who are using it for online-ticketing. But perhaps expectations have been unrealistic. PHP is not a general purpose language: don't expect to do intense number- crunching quickly or be able to write device drivers with PHP...

http://phplens.com/phpeverywhere/?q=node/view/211

PHP Entry Wins in its Category on Apress Contest

If you'll remember a while back, there was a contest sponsored by APress to create Mandelbrot Fractals in your favorite language. Well, here it is, about 20 days after the final submission date and we have a winner - a PHP-based winner!

http://phpdeveloper.org/news/3915

Web Application Security Reviews

As we continue to develop what I like to think is Enterprise PHP software, one of the most painful parts of the software installation is when we have to go through security audits. The most sticky and difficult ones that i have seen are the audits of financial institutions...

http://phplens.com/phpeverywhere/?q=node/view/213

PHP 4.4, 5.0.5 Backward Compatibility Breaks Resulting in Bad PR

I'm sure that there are good reasons for the new memory corruption warnings that appear in PHP 4.4 and 5.0.5. However the PHP engine developers have done an extremely bad job in explaining why many things that worked in earlier versions of PHP now breaks, or why we are now getting "Fatal error/Warning: Only variables can be passed by reference..." messages. This sort of confusion leaves a bad taste in the mouth...

http://phplens.com/phpeverywhere/?q=node/view/214

The Voice of Reason in PHP

Zeev Suraski: "First of all, in general - I don't subscribe to the school of 'we broke something, why not break more'. With every feature we break, we reduce the chances of people upgrading, of legacy apps working, and we reduce the overall success chances of the new version. Compatibility breakup is not binary, it accumulates. The more features are broken, the worse the situation becomes..."

http://phplens.com/phpeverywhere/?q=node/view/212

Passing array data through SOAP using PHP 5

I'd been looking hi and lo for an example of array passing using PHP 5's new SOAP engine. SOAP, for those of you non-techies who haven't passed out from boredom, is a standard protocol used for communicating from one system to another. Best of all, its underlying technologies are web-based, so devices like firewalls and routers usually don't interfere (too much) with these transactions...

http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2005/02/passing-array-data-through-php-5s-soap.html

Develop rock-solid code in PHP

If you are developing Web Applications and need speed, functionality, and platform-independence; PHP is a natural choice. Moreover it's free, and easy to learn and deploy. These are the strengths that make PHP so popular. But these same strengths can turn into weaknesses if you're not careful. Because of PHP's ease-of-use, developers often get tempted to hammer code straight into their editors...

http://www.zend.com/zend/tut/tut-hatwar.php

Database abstraction in PHP

In a previous job when I was responsible for hiring PHP developers, I always used to ask questions about database abstraction in my interviews. It's amazing how often candidates with the best-looking CV's, and impressive looking project lists, were tripped up by their lack of knowledge of what a database abstraction layer is, and were unfamiliar with any of the main database abstraction layers...

http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/ian_gilfillan20050906.php3

Sep. 2005 count of domains running PHP: 22,167,075 domains
Sep. 2005 count of IP addresses running PHP: 1,283,102 IP addresses

* Fresh data! :-)

Organizations using PHP

As usual, we'll wrap up with our traditional list of significant organizations using PHP.

CapitalOne, NASA, the W3C, HP, 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, Yahoo, Indiana University, Deutsche Telecomm, Bang & Olufsen, Siemens, Unilever, Philips, BMC, NTT, Air Canada, Lufthansa, Dialpad, BMC, Mitsubishi, MP3.com, the Arizona Republic, Deloitte Consulting, the US Navy, Nokia, Valero, Electronic Arts

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