adapting to the new environment
Great speculation on the future of PHP now that Ruby on Rails has tipped. That graph on PHP usage looks like the start of a downward trend, but the latest snapshot tells a different story. Still, Duncan’s got an interesting argument going.
I’m just thankful that rails has come along because it’s forcing every other web framework with a handful of devotees to react and improve, and that can only be a good thing.
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I would’ve posted this on that Suttree post, but a key point he doesn’t mention is deployment. PHP’s wide usage is also largely due to it being part of every $3 hosting plan at every ISP on the planet. Rails is whole different game when it comes to deployment — check Textdrive’s uptime and load problems for an example.
Good point TG. I’m not sure if you can blame Textdrive’s uptime issues squarely on Rails though; there are other hosting operations, like Segpub doing Rails hosting without any stability issues.
I have to come clean on the usage graph - I was just using that to break up all the text and make the post a bit more interesting. I know the graph looks like it’s about to tail off but I don’t really expect that to happen for a while yet.
Although I didn’t mention the deployment issue with regards to RoR, I did mention it with regards to the slow adoption of PHP 5 and most likely PHP 6. I had no idea that Textdrive were suffering stability problems though, that’s one area where the Zend framework and PHP 6 could consolidate their huge install base - if caching and opt-code caching are built in.