Lukas Smith has posted some ominous thoughts about the future of the LAMP stack in the online development world - specifically asking if the popularity of the grouping could be what might ultimately cause its downfall.

The issue is that there is simply not enough top qualified talent that knows LAMP well enough to hire. Or maybe its just too hard to find them? It seems all the good guys are already hired. As a result companies end up looking for other technology, not because they actually believe that these technologies are any better or worth the license fees that these usually require to be paid up...

He suggests two things that could be possible lead-ins to the "demise" of LAMP - the fact that LAMP just isn't taught along side other languages in school and that, since PHP is only just now getting into the offices of the "major players", there hasn't been enough time to prove to them that PHP has worth in their business.

Be sure to check out some of the great comments on this one.

In this new post to the PHP 10.0 blog, Stas mentions the "impending doom" of PHP that's been going around the community, including in this post on the TechRepublic site.

He does, however, branch off into something much more interesting that seems to be somewhat ignored by developers - the use of ticks on their code:

This is something named "ticks" - I wonder how many of the PHP developers heard about it and of those how many actually used it. Could it be used for offloading long-running I/O-bound tasks or grouping them together (e.g. so we could wait for DB and HTTP in parallel and not sequentially)? Would there be any use at all for such functionality and if so - how it's supposed to work? I.e. how would you know it's done and how you would collect and use the results?

It's suggested in the comments that it could be used for any kind of application that might need the pseudo-multithreading it offers (including something like scripts needing multiple TCP connections).

In this new post to the PHP 10.0 blog, Stas mentions the "impending doom" of PHP that's been going around the community, including in this post on the TechRepublic site.

He does, however, branch off into something much more interesting that seems to be somewhat ignored by developers - the use of ticks on their code:

This is something named "ticks" - I wonder how many of the PHP developers heard about it and of those how many actually used it. Could it be used for offloading long-running I/O-bound tasks or grouping them together (e.g. so we could wait for DB and HTTP in parallel and not sequentially)? Would there be any use at all for such functionality and if so - how it's supposed to work? I.e. how would you know it's done and how you would collect and use the results?

It's suggested in the comments that it could be used for any kind of application that might need the pseudo-multithreading it offers (including something like scripts needing multiple TCP connections).

In a new entry on his blog today, Jeremy Privett shares some of his thoughts and asks the question that's crossed more than a few developers' minds out there - "is PHP doomed?"

As an outsider looking in, and being a realist instead of a fanboy, I'm finding it extremely hard to believe that PHP is going to continue its much hyped and proclaimed success in its current circumstances.

From his point of view there's a few things that, if the web was exposed to (like "tiffs that occur on PHP Internals") PHP's popularity would fade quite a bit.

As much as I hate to say this...You guys really need to take some advice from Ruby Devs. I've been watching the Dev List over there and following it as well, and I don't see even half of the virtual crap-flinging that's almost become an everyday occurrence on the PHP Internals list.

In a new entry on his blog today, Jeremy Privett shares some of his thoughts and asks the question that's crossed more than a few developers' minds out there - "is PHP doomed?"

As an outsider looking in, and being a realist instead of a fanboy, I'm finding it extremely hard to believe that PHP is going to continue its much hyped and proclaimed success in its current circumstances.

From his point of view there's a few things that, if the web was exposed to (like "tiffs that occur on PHP Internals") PHP's popularity would fade quite a bit.

As much as I hate to say this...You guys really need to take some advice from Ruby Devs. I've been watching the Dev List over there and following it as well, and I don't see even half of the virtual crap-flinging that's almost become an everyday occurrence on the PHP Internals list.