Datasheet

Chapter 1 ✦ Why PHP and MySQL?

team will accept every random contribution into the official distribution without community

buy-in, but independent developers can and do distribute their own extensions which may be

later folded into the main PHP package in more or less unitary form. For instance, Dan Libby’s

elegant xmlrpc-epi extension was adopted as part of the PHP distribution in version 4.1, a few

months after it was first released as an independent package.

PHP development is also constant and ongoing. Although there are clearly major inflection

points, such as the transition between PHP4 and PHP5, these tend to be most important deep

in the guts of the parser — people were actually working on major extensions throughout the

transition period without critical problems. Furthermore, the PHP group subscribes to the

open source philosophy of “release early, release often,” which gives developers many oppor-

tunities to follow along with changes and report bugs. Compare this release scheme to the

.NET transition, which has left developers with almost a year in which Microsoft is not really

improving IIS but has not yet released a prime-time version of .NET server.

It hasn’t always been the case that MySQL added new features in a timely fashion. It would

probably be fair to say that a significant chunk of PostgreSQL users are former MySQL users

frustrated by the lack of transaction support, for example. However, the 4.0 and 4.1 versions

have remedied this and other inequities. Transactions are in the software today, while subse-

lects and foreign keys are experimental but coming along nicely.

Popularity

PHP is fast becoming one of the most popular choices for so-called two-tier development

(Web plus data). Figure 1-2 charts growth since 1999.

Figure 1-2: Netcraft survey of PHP use

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