Tiobe announced their Programming Community Index for January 2007 like every year, and it was very important to notice that this year PHP have lost one rank to become number five, compared to visual basic which jumped to rank four. But most noticeable this year is Ruby, which jumped from rank 21 to rank 10 !
It is important to notice that all Ruby popularity is due to its unique and powerful framework Ruby On Rails, while development around PHP was mainly focused on the release of PHP5 in addition to some improvements of PHP4 which remain until today the most popular.
The question is, if Ruby On Rails is the best framework for Ruby, which one is the best framework for PHP ? difficult to answer because there is not a best framework in general, each one have positive and negative points against others, but I think in top of the list you’ll list : CakePHP, Zend framework, and ezComponents, of course the full list is very very long.
I don’t call this a negative point for the popularity of PHP, but a positive one ! Because here you have the choice between many robust frameworks. But I blame the PHP team for example for releasing this year PHP 5.1.3 and 5.1.4 with only 5 days between the two release due to a critical bug that appeared in 5.1.3. Certainly a security release is great to keep the software and users safe, but such small delay between different releases make adoption of PHP5 more difficult, while many still hesitate to move from PHP4 to PHP5.
Maybe this is the most important issue, in addition to the compatibility which wasn’t respected as announced. PHP4 was very popular without all OOP support, so I think it’s important to consider the product ‘PHP’ and don’t let the switch between version a problem for the programming language. Today I’m not sure what is going to happen for PHP6, is version 4 and 5 will be discontinued or the development will stay forever ?
Last but not least, it’s important to thank the QA team for their great effort to make PHP better. In the end I have only to recommend for the PHP team and the community a better coordination in 2007. Wish always a better future for PHP !
Yes , the framework Rails may have given such a great popularity for the Ruby language .
PHP also need a unique framework . So it may be the best language for the web .
I hope Zend may help with the Zend framework .