Datasheet

Part I ✦ PHP: The Basics

Although it’s not evident from this graphic, the period October 1998 through October 1999

showed 800 percent growth in the number of domains. As Web sites become even more ubiq-

uitous, and as more of them go beyond simple static HTML pages, PHP is expected to gain

ground quickly in absolute numbers of users.

Although it’s somewhat more difficult to get firm figures, it seems that PHP is also in a strong

position relative to similar products. According to a 2002 Zend report, Microsoft Active

Server Pages technology appears to be utilized on about 24 percent of Web servers, whereas

ColdFusion is implemented on approximately 4 percent of surveyed domains. PHP is used on

over 24 percent of all Web servers, as measured by a larger and more accurate sample, and is

now said to be the most popular server-side scripting language on the Web.

Active Server Pages and ColdFusion used to be highly visible because they tended to be dis-

proportionately selected by large e-commerce sites. However, the realities of the Web finally

caught up with us — and it is the flashy e-commerce sites that were disproportionately

thinned by the dot-bomb crash. It is now becoming clearer that most Web sites are informa-

tional rather than direct revenue centers and, therefore, do not repay high development

expenses in an immediate way. PHP enjoys substantial advantages over its competitors in

this development category, which has turned out to be the majority of the Internet.

Not proprietary

The history of the personal computer industry to date has largely been a chronicle of propri-

etary standards: attempts to establish them, clashes between them, their benefits and draw-

backs for the consumer, and how they are eventually replaced with new standards.

But in the past few years the Internet has demonstrated the great convenience of voluntary,

standards-based, platform-independent compatibility. E-mail, for example, works so well

because it enjoys a clear, firm standard to which every program on every platform must

conform. New developments that break with the standard (for example, HTML-based e-mail

stationery) are generally regarded as deviations, and their users find themselves having to

bear the burdens of early adoption.

Furthermore, customers (especially the big-fish businesses with large systems) are fed up

with spending vast sums to conform to a proprietary standard — only to have the market

uptake not turn out as promised. Much of the current momentum toward XML and Web ser-

vices is driven by years of customer disappointment with Java RMI, CORBA, COM, and even

older proprietary methods and data formats.

Right now, software developers are in a period of experimentation and flux concerning propri-

etary versus open standards. Companies want to be sure they can maintain profitability while

adopting open standards. There have been some major legal conflicts related to proprietary

standards, which are still being resolved. These could eventually result in mandated changes

to the codebase itself or even affect the futures of the companies involved. In the face of all

this uncertainty, a growing number of businesses are attracted to solutions that they know

will not have these problems in the foreseeable future.

PHP is in a position of maximum flexibility because it is, so to speak, antiproprietary. It is not

tied to any one server operating system, unlike Active Server Pages. It is not tied to any pro-

prietary cross-platform standard or middleware, as Java Server Pages or ColdFusion are. It is

not tied to any one browser or implementation of a programming language or database. PHP

isn’t even doctrinaire about working only with other open source software. This independent

but cooperative pragmatism should help PHP ride out the stormy seas that seem to lie ahead.

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