PanNotes

Zend, the primary company behind PHP, has just released version 1.0 of the web framework they have been developing for the last 20 months…

On Tuesday Zend launched a beta of Zend Core 2.0, a brand new and extremely important addition to the Zend Core line up. Unlike its predecessors, Zend Core 2.0 is not designed for a specific database or hardware platform, it is a stable, certified, and (optionally) supported PHP Application Server bundle provided by Zend. It looks like they won’t be releasing a Zend Core for Windows or Zend Core for MySQL but instead will deliver a single, cross-platform product that includes the improvements from the collaboration with Microsoft. In addition to that, they are including a whole lot more…

Last Friday there was a rather spirited discussion at the office between Kaiton (a Ruby aficionado and ex-Panmedia employee currently at Microsoft), Nesta (a python aficionado who is forced to use PHP) and myself, (an un-biased PHP user who is forced to defend it ;-). The topic of course was PHP, its woes, its past, its present and its future.

According to Kaiton, PHP will be marginalised in 2008 by more literate programming languages like Ruby, Python and even Erlang. His view is that as the web becomes more important to business, backend programmers will start to get involved in the front end and web programming will be dominated by more experienced programmers who care more about the language they code with. According to Nesta, Drupal is the only good thing that ever came out of PHP. I think that 2007 will be the year of PHP.