The comparison is only on web applications and dynamic websites, as PHP does not compete on the desktop. I am a PHP programmer, but I work in Java on university-related projects. If you notice something is missing from the comparisons in this list, feel free to comment and complete my depiction of Java features, and of PHP too.

His list of five things includes that there's no compilation required in PHP applications (running is "compiling"), that there's a unified platform to work on and that there's a lot more included "out of the box" than with Java (like database connectivity).

I've seen many programmers starting to think that Java is old and verbose, and trying to jump on the bandwagon of scripting languages such as PHP and Ruby. But it's not so simple, as these languages are late to the party in many areas. Here are the 5 things that as a PHP programmer I started envy Java for.

The five features on his list are:

• Hibernate
• Generics
• Keeping objects in memory between requests
• Java Collection Framework
• Asynchronous processing

Keep an eye out for his next article - he flips it around and talks about what Java developers have to envy about PHP's features.