Oracle, IBM, Zend and PHP

[jatar_k]

some interesting developments in the last while for php, well zend but the 2 are fairly synonymous

IBM And Zend Team to Accelerate Open Source Momentum [www-1.ibm.com] not sure if we had that here before

Oracle And Zend Partner On Development And Deployment Foundation For Php-Based Applications [oracle.com] very excited about this in particular since php and oracle is my daily bread

PHP Growth
php pushing 2 million domains [php.net] april 2005
check out the "Programming Community Index" link on that page as well

[grandpa]

The "Programming Community Index" tends to indicate that is may be some time yet before PHP becomes 'an odd outdated language [webmasterworld.com]'. I cut my programming teeth on COBOL, and it is both sad and refreshing to see that clunky old language fade into obscurity.

The news of Oracle and PHP partnering is kind of eye opening. This has got to be aimed at high end business. Or are web hosts offering an option of Oracle or MySQL already?

[coopster]

>>not sure if we had that here before

hehe, should sound familiar silly, you responded ;)

[webmasterworld.com...]

The followed the PCI link you mentioned ... a picture is worth a thousand words. The two that surprised me the most were Python moving down and Fortran moving up.

[jatar_k]

>> you replied

that's why I put the IBM specific one, I knew I hadn't read it on there before, hehe, man I'm losin it.

>> oracle or mysql

no, they would never be able to afford the licensing, we pay them a lot of money every year. Seeing PHP becoming more involved with the corporate solutions is great.

I also see there is a PHP development Centre at oracle now too
[oracle.com...]

[ergophobe]

You may be losing it, but not as bad as me - I started that thread and I didn't recognize it either until coopster linked to it.

PHP becomes 'an odd outdated language'.

I was wondering if anyone had seen that. I think PHP will end up like COBOL - eventually outdated but persistent because of a humunguous library of legacy code that, for any shortcomings, still runs. I don't think it will go the way of C - a language that any serious programmer must know to some degree even 40 years after it became mainstream.

Fortran moving up.

I thought I read somewhere that someone was planning to do with FORTRAN basically what MS did with BASIC and Borland did with Pacal - essentially create a new language that was vaguely FORTRAN-based. Maybe that's got people looking at it again (shudder! My first job that did not involve cleaning toilets or cleaning fish was programming in FORTRAN. I think that's a main reason I became a historian!)

[coopster]

PHP becomes 'an odd outdated language'.

I caught that too but I let 'er go, ergo ;)

Have you ever seen the movie "Space Cowboys" with Clint Eastwood? hehe, I laugh and think about some of the code I have written that is still in production (other languages, not PHP). It was never, and I do mean never, meant to be running as long as it has, yet still is today. And in production environments, mind you. Odds are very good that the code will still be running soundly long after I'm gone, unless I get called into space to write the override patch like in the movie ;)

I think that seeing some heavy-hitters throwing resources behind PHP is an obvious sign that the language will have a long stay. I just hope that they (heavy-hitters) don't go and foul things up. I've seen IBM *optimize* their platforms for java after embracing that language and make the technology much more expensive than necessary, turning quite a few people off to the IBM-supplied solutions, which in turn hurt the language in some respects as folks went elsewhere for solutions. (Don't get me wrong folks, I do indeed like IBM, this is merely an example).

The next year or two is going to be interesting, no doubt. It is very exciting and will provide many opportunities.

[ergophobe]

I tend to take a long view of many things. So don't get me wrong, I don't mean to say that PHP will be gone in five years or that huge amounts of PHP legacy code won't be running for decades. I'm just saying that huge players were on board for COBOL and a little less so for Pascal. When I was in college, it was Pascal, Pascal, Pascal. It was going to save the world with enforced structured programming. And then all of the sudden, WHOOPS! Objects! Granted, Pascal was always conceived partly as an academic language, but still, the way folks talked you would have expected it to dominate by the late 1980s, instead of virtually disappear.

So sure, PHP will never be one of those language like Smalltalk, that great as it supposedly was (never tried it), never built up the code base to go long term. On the other hand, I think C/C++ and Lisp (within the AI community) are exceptions in terms of longevity and I doubt that regardless of any collaborations b/w IBM, Oracle and Zend, PHP will have that kind of staying power. I could be wrong though. I think the staying power of C/C++ and Lisp are due to the fact that they really are extremely good for doing what it is that they do (low-level machine code and high-level AI tasks) and it's possible that PHP being very good for web-based interaction will have the legs that C/C++ does.

As I always tell people, though, my specialty is the past, not the future and if you need proof I'll let you see some of my stock picks (mostly out of business!).

[jatar_k]

>> I've seen IBM *optimize* their platforms for java after embracing that language and make the technology much more expensive than necessary

The word is that IBM said "we know what we did to JAVA" and don't want a repeat of that, but as someone said to me, them screwing up JAVA left the door open for PHP. ;) Zend being fairly dedicated to the open source community should help as well.

We'll see how it goes, my ability for predicting the future is pretty poor as well so I'll let time tell me what happens in its own time.