I decided to take a look and see what was going on behind the scenes by reading on the index definition to see if I could understand what happened. After reading through the definition I still don't know what happened, or even why it happened.

He goes through how the index data is created - search results from the top 6 hits in Alexa for each language result - and how he, basically, found nothing out of the ordinary. He points out that, because of inconsistencies like this, the TIOBE index shouldn't be regarded as much more than a loose guide. Since it's based on hard-coded search strings, it'll never be a true judge of "popularity" overall.

Overall, the spread of PHP seems to have settled down this month to a more stable value. For this month, the number of domain using PHP came in at 19 million (19,404,533) and the number of IPs using PHP is at 1.3 million (1,319,743). This drop can be somewhat attributed to several hosts being made aware of the "expose_php" setting in their installations and turning it off for security reasons.

You can check out this month's numbers as well as how it relates to previous months (and years) in this graph.

Added to the list were:

• symfony
• Zend Framework
• CakePHP
• Code Igniter
• Prado

• eZ publish
• Krill
• php-booba
• edit-x
• Binary Cloud