PHP 5.3 has been released in June 2009, so it took a while to gain that level of popularity. End of support for PHP 5.2 has been declared in December 2010, but is was still the most popular version until now. Version 5.3 will enter the end-of-life cycle in March 2013. Version 5.4, used by only 3.0%, is now considered state-of-the-art.

The numbers have been consistently trending towards intersection with the usage of PHP 5.4 picking up, but no where near the 5.3 and 5.2 numbers. They also point out that PHP version adoption has a history of being slow. Contributing factors to this could be the overall impression of the language and how much "room for improvement" it seems to have.

It's not difficult to predict that PHP as a language will continue to dominate web development in the near future. What will be more exciting is to watch what new versions of PHP will look like.

The PHP Standards Group is trying to push new specifications for PHP coding standards. Whether PHP developers need and will adopt these standards was one of the main topics discussed by Manuel Lemos and Arturs Sosins in episode 24 of the Lately in PHP podcast.

They also talk about some of the comments that Linus Torvalds recently made about the limitations of Github and recent PHP releases (bugfixes). You can listen to this latest episode using the in-page player or you can download the mp3 and listen locally. If you enjoy it, consider subscribing to their feed to get this and future episodes.

n case you missed it, the PHP team has just released 5.2.14, which effectively ends active support for the 5.2 branch. [...] The logic behind this decision is...puzzling.

He mentions the recent announcements of a few large PHP-based projects to officially support PHP 5.2 and how, because of the large jump in functionality from pre-5.2, it might be a good idea to reconsider this (preemptive?) retirement. He adds that making a move like this without consideration to these larger products could reflect negatively on the language itself. Be sure to check out the comments for more views from other members of the community.

As a programmer, I would hold it to any site owner to check their site's requirements and the offerings of their host before they unnecessarily waste a lot of time and money, but as a system administrator I frown upon shared hosting providers offering software with known compatibility issues just to be able to advertise as the '�latest and greatest'�. The latest isn't always the greatest, and it won't be until the community catches up with what the greatest has to offer.

She notes that her situation, much like many other hosting companies, is that they're "just not ready" to make the upgrade because of some of the hassle it might cause the users. Similar situations happened with the change from PHP4 to PHP5. She also mentions a few specific issues:

• Compatibility issues - several very popular applications don't support some of the 5.3 changes
• There no Zend Optimizer/Zend Guard support
• It's not required for PCI compliance yet

Prefixes serve their primary purpose well: when used correctly, they will ensure that your class names do not have naming conflicts. Unfortunately, they are long and pedantic, and provide no additional benefits. [...] Namespaces provide other benefits than shorter class names, though.

He illustrates with a well-structured example that makes it clear as to what resources are being used and how they're split out. His snippet defines the structure of the rest of the script without even a line of code in the class. He also briefly mentions the PHP 5.3 adoption levels and notes that several larger projects will be 5.3-only soon and will start to force the hand of developers and hosting companies.

[Remi] was expressing his surprise at how few people participated: "I refuse to believe there are only a couple of dozen PHP developers in Europe." It's an odd statement...the world and his dog knows that PHP is immensely popular over here in Europe. Perhaps Remi completely overlooked the Windows factor here?

Stuart points out that he's seen around fifteen percent of developers using Windows as a development platform, but only three percent use it as production server. There also seems to be a lack of interest in the whole PHP-on-Windows space.

Now that PHP 5.3 has been around for a few months and we've started seeing plenty of blog posts covering all the new features in PHP 5.3, I'm wondering whether or not you have actually moved to PHP 5.3 yet.

To cast your vote, head over to this poll and choose one of the options (or Other). As of the time of this post, it looks like the "No, my $distro doesn't support it yet" option is barely in the lead in front of "Yes...and I'm loving it!". There's lots of reasons in the "Other" category as well. Get your vote in before September 21st when the poll closes.

Developers are notoriously self-confident in their ability to write code that is better, faster, cleaner and better-smelling than everybody else's. In today's environment, however, the focus is on producing immediately useful code'"and, given the richness of today's frameworks, those who eschew them in favour of home-grown solutions are forever running the risk of reinventing the wheel for no good reason. We have enough wheels'"start building some cars.

He suggests that, with all of the "reinventing the wheel" that's been going on and overpowering frameworks that are out there, that developers need to take a step back and find a framework that fits for them. Coding from scratch (usually) isn't a good option - there's almost always a framework or application based on one out there that'll fit with just what you need.

Pick a framework that has a thriving community and then spend the time to learn it. Quit re-inventing the wheel, start using the wheel to solve your client's problems. Get out there and build them a car.

• PHP 5 set record of growth : + 2,5%, up to 32%
• PHP 5.2 is the second most popular version, ahead of 4.3.
• PHP 4.4.8's popularity is falling

You can check out the numbers yourself for the month as well as the evolution stats showing how things are progressing. He's also added a new graph this month showing the adoption rate that PHP5 is having in the online world.

I was recently interviewed by Computerworld UK regarding our launch in the UK and the current rise of PHP in the corporate world. The result is online here.

He also asks readers how they see PHP adoption going in their companies: "Post a comment to let me know how 'PHP' and 'Business' go together in your region."