If you follow the PHP blogs, then you are likely to have read Matt “WordPress” Mullenweg’s anti-PHP 5 rant:

PHP 5 has been, from an adoption point of view, a complete flop. Most estimates place it in the single-digit percentages or at best the low teens, mostly gassed by marginal frameworks.

He makes some good points in the post. He also manages to make himself seem like a bit of a dick

The thing that I keep wondering is if we aren’t seeing a slowdown in general PHP adoption due to other technologies being able to get a leg up while PHP 5 was in development and the succeeding slow migration from PHP 4 to 5.

Now that I work for a company creating Java-based software, I see:

• Zend on the PHP-side, who are happy to announce version 1.0 of object-oriented Zend Framework and J2EE on the Java-side already out there on the market for quite some time.
• On the Java-side, Alfresco continuously and quickly building a high-quality ECM based on Open Source Java components and on the PHP-side eZ Systems who yet do not have their flagship ECM product migrated to PHP 5.

Finally, with PHP 5, it is possible to build OO libraries able to compete with Java libraries as far as quality is concerned – but, well, those Java libraries already have a long market track-record, i.e. have been in production use for a long time.

My impression is that PHP 5 slowed down the development of PHP applications able to compete with similar Java-based server-side products. The problem being that migration from PHP 4 to PHP 5 consumes quite some developer resources for complex PHP applications. Additionally, PHP 4 keeps developers busy with finding workarounds for their applications due to limited OO features.

Did PHP applications lose market share or at least not grow as fast as their Java (or C#, etc.) counterparts due to the slow adoption of PHP 5? Unfortunately, I did not find an informative basis to answer this question sufficiently and would appreciate any hints.

The ZZ/OSS Installer Client (ZIC) for the Web browser will be released as a stand-alone application on December 15th. This is when the forthcoming issue of the International PHP Magazine ships with an article on the ZIC.

Currently, I am cleaning up the code base and I will later add some additional features. Alltogether, the ZIC should then be ready for use in PHP projects that want to profit from advanced packaging and release management, ensuring a high reusability of the application components.

These are some of the features of the ZIC:
- Provides a Web GUI aka installation wizard look and feel.
- Command line interface is under development.
- Allows definition of packages, applications, and distributions in XML.
- Automatic resolution of package dependencies.
- Tools for easier development of packages.
- Plugin framework for build routines (e.g. to set up or update a database from SQL dumps).
- Customization of HTML layout for in-house products.
- Supports full, minimal or customized installations.
- Allows for non-conflicting installation on shared hosts environments
- Installer can upgrade itself.
- Sources are LGPL licensed for greater flexibility in usage

Some known PHP developers have commented on the preview version of ZIC at this year’s Linuxtag:

Wez Furlong
Lukas Smith
Christian Stocker

My company partner Christian Zonsius is currently working on the ZZ/OSS Installer Server (ZIS) which forms the backbone of the envisaged deployment architecture for distributed package hosting. The ZIS will as well be released on December 15th, not as stable as the ZIC, but as a preview version for testing.

Both, ZIC and ZIS are based on concepts, ideas, and libraries that evolved within PHP’s PEAR community, namely the PEAR package manager and the PEAR Web. ZZ/OSS has extended these technologies, to make use of the defined standards and furthermore bring advanced release management to the application level (as compared to PEAR, where release management is only able on the package level of class libraries).

From the Twisted Website:

“Twisted is a framework, written in Python, for writing networked applications. It includes implementations of a number of commonly used network services such as a web server, an IRC chat server, a mail server, a relational database interface and an object broker. Developers can build applications using all of these services as well as custom services that they write themselves. Twisted also includes a user authentication system that controls access to services and provides services with user context information to implement their own security models.

Twisted provides important features needed for networking programming, both at the high and low levels:

- Pluggable event loops allowing the developer to take advantage of platform-specific capabilities.
- Abstractions of protocols and transports.
- Through Twisted Spread, mechanisms for network encoding of data (in Python, Java, ELisp, and other languages), to a full-blown distributed object system.”

http://www.twistedmatrix.com/products/twisted