Ruby's popularity is so dependant on Rails that learning the Ruby language becomes difficult. Ruby also has to be installed so using eRuby or Rails is not a default possibility in the world of shared web hosting where PHP is king.

Man, just give up. I'd rather see you explain how nice it is to write ASP extensions rather than read a muddled explanation of something you admit you don't understand very well.

You obviously live in a cave. Any Google search shows articles about how Rails is what launched Ruby into the limelight and is what is making it more popular everyday. Articles written by Ruby and Rails developers.

Do some research before you try to flame someone.

Have you actually written an extension for PHP? Is PECL really dead when two new extensions were added this past week? Your solution to this dilemma you have created (that also runs on almost everything out there) is...?

Not very helpful.

Rubuy has not life without Rails. But all of Rails power is only small part of power that PHP has.

Ruby has Rails.

PHP has CakePHP, SolarPHP, Zend Framework, Symfony that are all more powerful than Rails.

So who care Rails?

Everybody knows Apache is the best...u better do some research befor saing that...
Does IIS support...REWRITE and many other nice things that made it superb like .htaccess files :D u r noob man

I certainly hope that I will never see in the LAMP environment something like IIS, which is one of the worst applications I have ever seen. About PHP, it will maybe die if the developers don't decide to change the path they are working on. Real OOP is needed and a lot of classes.

The end of PHP?

No way.

Feature for feature, someone will always prove that PHP isn't as good as another language. But it's been proven over and over again that the "best" doesn't always win in the end. There are simply too many hard core PHP programmers out there that will never switch.

Deal with it. And move on.

As a ZCE (Zend Certified Engineer), I've been developing client side (Command Line scripts, GUI app using PHP-GTK) and server side applications using PHP for about 2 years now. I develop with PHP primarily because it is in the main operating system agnostic.

If I have a client who wants an app for their Linux box then fine. If they also HAVE to have it on some guys windows laptop, then guess what, it is fine! Truly minimal recoding (most of which is just using built in directives rather than actual changes in logic and this is done at design time cause I know that not all OS's are the same - that's a good thing).

As Marco Tabini says in his rebuttal to this article (available at http://blogs.phparch.com/mt/?p=130), PHP is about choice. I leave the choice of what platform, what server, what operating system to the client. If I tell them they MUST buy a particular brand of server/OS/etc or pay for a particularly restricted form of licensing, then they will go elsewhere.

For me, PHP works. And it works everywhere.

A point raised here was the lack of an IDE. I am confused by this. I choose to do my coding in an editor which supports auto-completion and instant help lookup for the builtin functions as well as for my own classes and functions. I can build developer orientated documentation for my code without resorting to an external help editor simply by having it as part of my code (phpDocumentor and docblocks).

Whilst I learnt to do HTML by hand, I know I can use Dreamweaver for my Smarty Templates. I believe you can even do your PHP coding in Dreamweaver.

I have a choice. I can do it how I want to. So can anyone else. I'm not tied to doing things the MS way.

Regards,

Richard Quadling.

PHP is the most versatile Language in the market. Others have some great features but just simply fail. I work in Web Development and we have truely tried all aspects of other languages... always looking to see what is new. And do we get something over PHP? Sometimes... sometimes we get a small function that is cool that PHP can't handle, but we always dump it cause most times, with x language, thats all we get. PHP is always the winner. Why? True multi-platform development. We get the job done with PHP on every major platform and by combining it with other languages it is absolute power. I see PHP evolving quite well. It will take its place as a standard. That is it's eveolution. Lets be honest, in web development, it pretty much is the standard. Other languages may come along, but I don't think they are going to outcast PHP's huge shadow.

I understand youre coming from MS/ASP background... but please before publishing such article... please try to research a little more. I seriously doubt anything will be so lightweight as well as portable (between OS/Architecture/Webserver App) in the recent years.

Also youre title of the article is measleading. Unless the core developers publish such notice that PHP is approaching its life cycle, I dont really see how you claim such thing. I really do think hiveminds should do better than such articles.

As for IDE... please... try to "use" some IDEs before you make such claim. You'll find IDEs in different colors/os/licence/brands/performance etc.