Popularity PHP v ASP v JSP v CFM

Here's a measure by a PHP site

[cyril kearney]

[php.weblogs.com...]

This is an interesting way to take a measurement. ASP pages was the clear leader but PHP makes a much stronger showing than JSP. Should I believe that?

Is PHP the REAL JSP killer?

[toolman]

I have put some heavy thought into this lately.

The more I look at the "big picture" and the progress toward a more global marketplace, the more I see asp/.NET becoming isolated as a US-centric technology. I just don't foresee worlwide adoption of anything Microsoft taking hold in the current atmosphere of open source.

What are the worlwide banking systems running on? What is the choice for os's by governments being made? And most importantly, what is the impetus behind the migration from M$ products?

[Cheznoir]

I agree. We are a long time Microsoft shop and kept with Microsoft as each new release seemed to be just a step from where we were at currently.

But .net and xp are a jump away and the new licensing on ms sql was all of a sudden very pricy for smaller projects.

So it was time to look at all our code and our future. Since whatever we used was not going to be backwards compatible with our old system we could start fresh.

We have left some stuff on legacy systems for now, NT 4 and MS backend. But all new projects use freebsd,apache, php and mysql. You can't beat the price and for less money the products perform better, have more free support options and besides an issue with full text searches and mysql, no serious problems.

I have talked to other developers on ms focused sites who are going through the same pain. As a MS developer for over 10 years the choice wasn't taken lightly but MS is really heading down a road I do not care to take.

Chet

[alex_h]

MCSE turned PHP 4 programmer...

I am with the former MS shops, after the fiasco with NT 4 certifications, I got really annoyed. I didn't like being dependent on Microsoft. I feel that MS's strategy is about making a lot of "good enough" products that make you use them all.

Sure MS SQL and ASP are decent, but I feel that Oracle and DB2 kick MS SQL's ass on the high end, and PostgreSQL (which we use) kicks its ass on the low-mid range. For certain projects, MySQL may even make sense.

I feel that ASP is okay, but Java/JSP is the best "technically" though we use PHP for a variety of reasons. The speed of testing and deploying PHP runs circles around JSP, enough that we work around PHP's OOP limitations.

I feel that PHP is VERY underrepresented in these numbers. PHP programmers on Apache are MUCH more likely to play games. Parsing .html with PHP is a nobrainer (as the performance hit of the PHP parser is trivial) and hides the underlying technology from the server. Also, you can just use directory names to hide the .php. I never showed the .php except on things like the search page, etc., I don't want penalties for dynamic content to apply.

Even without mod_rewrite, PHP users are likely to hide their use. With mod_rewrite, it becomes a no brainer. My URL structure is targetted at a logical format (we are working to remove all the meta-data from the URL these days), with the technology and scripts being totally separated.

Yet I won't show up in the survey as a PHP user, despite dozens of client sites sitting on top of our toolkits.

Alex

[Rivux]

alex_h - the same can be said for CF as well, it was trailing php only slightly, but a fast majority of cold fusion use, is behind the scenes and would therefore not be shown either.

I think php will catch up to asp someday and leave CF in the dust soon, mostly because its free and the cost for hosting is cheap. The largest obstacle with using CF is the cost of the software and of the hosting. Its hard to get decent CF hosting for less then $75us a month, which for most people is out of their budget.