Features

PHP Usage Waning: Report

By Indu Britto

Researchers at Evans Data Corporation report double digit drop-offs in developers using PHP, Perl and Python for development, based on findings compiled during a Spring 2005 Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) survey of 400 developers. Meanwhile, 61 percent of developers in EMEA say they have used open source software modules; about 33 percent have contributed back to the open source community.

"PHP, Perl and Python use on a global basis peaked one to two years ago and has started to decline based on a number of factors. This decline is more exaggerated in EMEA and APAC than in North America," said John Andrews, Evans Data's Chief Operating Officer.

"One of the key factors to this loss of developer mindshare has been the inability of these languages to penetrate the enterprise space," continued Andrews.

According to the EDC research:

PHP: the number of developers using PHP for development dropped by more than 25% in the last year and the number of developers indicating they would not evaluate or use PHP for future development projects grew by almost 40% in the same time period.
Perl: Perl usage in EMEA has dropped by more than 20% and those developers with no intentions to evaluate or use Perl grew by 20%.
Python: Python usage also saw a 25% reduction in current usage and developers without any intention to use or evaluate Python grew by 17% in the last year.

EDC also found a sharp rise in interest in 64-bit development projects. EMEA developers’ intentions to develop 64-bit applications in two or more years grew by more than 250% in the last six months, while those developers with no intentions to develop 64-bit applications dropped by almost 40% in the same period.

Zend disputes EDC's figures with its own pro-PHP figures and dismisses the view that Intel, SAP, Oracle and IBM placed bets on what is turning into an ephemeral developer strategy. Zend claims the number of monthly downloads of its Zend integrated development environment (IDE) today number 20,000, up from 5,000 in September 2004, with an accompanying 150% growth in the privately held company's revenue. Furthermore, Zend is opening offices worldwide. As for stats, Zend points to Netcraft who claims 22m internet domains use PHP, making it the internet's most popular scripting language."

"Microsoft is interested in PHP - the next version of IIS is going to support PHP. If there was no interest, or we were seeing a decline of interest in PHP, why would they get their product to support PHP?" asked Zend vice president of marketing Michel Gerin.

Furthermore, while EDC maintains PHP is not seeing "serious" deployment, Zend claims changes to the language like the addition of Object Orientation (OO) in PHP 5.0 mean the language is going beyond pure web site development and into the enterprise as an alternative to Java and C++.


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