On the Procore blog there's an excellent article covering their thoughts on the evolution of software applications and the different stages they go through during their development.

If you develop software long enough, you notice patterns. One pattern that isn’t talked about enough is how systems evolve over time.

The software industry is so focused on the flavor of the week that we lose perspective. Most of what is “invented” today was created decades ago. Most problems we face today were solved by someone else.

Software developers don’t have a good understanding of our own history. In the spirit of that, I present to you my take on how software tends to evolve and why.

He starts by defining a term that is used through the rest of the article, software gravity, and illustrates how it relates to development time and complexity. He then gets into describing the seven stages of software evolution as he sees them (starting with zero, naturally):

• Stage 0: Humans, Paper, and Spreadsheets
• Stage 1: Simple Script
• Stage 2: Pile Of Files
• Stage 3: The Framework
• Stage 4: Beyond The Framework
• Stage 5: Modularization
• Stage 6: Network System

For each of the points he provides an overview of what the application might be like at this stage and what levels the complexity/gravity are at. The post ends by asking about a "Stage 7" and if it even exists, suggesting that it might be an even further abstraction from previous steps.

Davey Shafik has a new post about doing the closing keynote at this year's ZendCon Europe conference (happening November 18th through 20th in Paris, France).

In a little under three weeks I will be giving the closing keynote at ZendCon Europe. This will my first keynote and I’m excited to be talking about The Evolution of DevOps.

His talk will cover how the DevOps role has come into its own over the past few years and what kinds of changes to expect, as a developer, in the upcoming years. If you'd like to hear this and lots of other great talks, there's still time to pick up your tickets for either just the conference or for both the conference and tutorials. You can even opt to take the Zend certification while you're at the event.

On Reddit.com today timoh has posted a "brief look back" at PHP's evolution to be "enterprise ready" and looks towards the future with some speculations as to what the coming years will bring to the language and its community.

I'm trying to evoke some disqussion about how we have come to the current point of life we have now going on in the PHP field, as an architectural decisions, design and best practices we use to build PHP based software today. [...] Of course PHP language itself has put some walls to design the software the way one would have liked, but still there are alot that could have been done better even "back in the days". At least "better" in a sense what it means today.

He points out that in recent years there's been a push in the community as a whole for things like SOLID/DRY principles, decoupled code and testing. He speculates about the future of things like the Symfony and Zend Frameworks (and the radical changes they both made from their version one to version two). Have your own thoughts about the evolution of PHP and where it might be headed? Share them here!

On the Acquia blog there's a new post looking at the evolution of the PHP language and some of the newer features included in recent releases.

PHP is not a young language. As of 2013, it's 18 years old; that's old enough to vote. Many upstart languages have appeared over the years to try and unseat PHP as the "lingua franca" of web applications but it still commands over 80% of the web market. One reason for PHP's popularity is no doubt the ease with which new developers can get started with it, but just as important is the fact that PHP has been evolving for all those 18 years.

He covers things added over the last several major revisions of the language (with code examples) - things like anonymous functions, traits and generators.

On the Inviqa techPortal today there's a new post talking about the most recent speaker at the PHP LondonRasmus Lerdorf.

July's PHP London had a particularly notable speaker – Rasmus Lerdorf himself presenting what's new in PHP. So many people wanted to attend that, with limited venue capacity, a live (and recorded) video stream was used for the first time. You can skip straight to seeing the slides and video of the session if you like, or keep reading for my impressions of the evening.

They include a brief overview of what Rasmus talked about including: a brief history and evolution of the language, a few points about PHP 5.4 and then on to the "shiny and new" of PHP 5.5. and the features it introduced. He also added in a bit at the end about two tools that his employer, Etsy, has released to help with more atomic deployments.

Ben Ramsey has a new post to his site where he reviews the "eras" of PHP that it's gone through in the past few years and ends up with what he calls the "Era of Testing" - the recent strong push that's being made to promote and encourage unit testing in PHP applications.

Over the past decade, the PHP community has progressed through a handful of distinct eras that have each been marked by a focus on specific best practices. This is most evident in the types of talks presented at conferences and user groups and in the articles published by php|architect magazine, PHPDeveloper.org, and the blogs of those whose feeds are distributed through Planet PHP. In thinking through this, I’ve come up with the following eras I think we, the PHP community, have had over the last ten years. These are in a general order, but eras overlap, and some have lasted longer than others, so there’s not a distinct beginning or end to each.

He briefly covers five different areas that PHP has evolved in over the past years: the shift to OOP, web application security, framework use, coding standards/organization and the push for better testing.

With the coming of the testing era, I’m seeing a lot of maturity in our community. The code we write is getting better. We’re following standards and best practices. We’re implementing a lot of good design principles. [...] I think the decade since PHP 5 was released has brought us to a great place as a community. [...] With each new era, we can’t forget what we’ve learned, though. We must continue teaching and revising these best practices as we learn more.

Slava Vishnyakov has an excellent (and long) post today to his site detailing some of his travels through his years of PHP development and some of the things he's learned along the way:

I was learning on my own, so I studied PHP from resources such as php.net. It’s a great resource when you consider abundance of the information, but it’s terrible, when you look at the quality of advise. I’ll start explaining how things evolved in my head in a hope that people will catch up where they are now to understand some things further. By no means this is a “definitive” guide to PHP. Just a few tricks that might help you save your precious time and nerves.

The post includes a lot of helpful hints covering things like the inevitable evolution of the codebase and the growing pains he worked though, the use of static methods, autoloading, bad variable naming, unit testing and MVC restructuring.

Damien Seguy has official published the PHP statistics for July 2008 to the Nexen.net website today. Here's a summary:

• PHP 5 reaches 40,63% of PHP market share
• PHP 5.2.6 usage is growing fast, about to take over PHP 5.2.5
• PHP 4.4.9 and 5.2.6 will threaten PHP 4.4.8's dominance in August 2008

You can find the evolution stats for this past month here and the full statistics here.

Damien Seguy has submitted the latest PHP usage statistics for the results of April 2008.

Highlights in this month's edition include:

• PHP 5.2.6 is growing up fast, thanks to no PHP 5.3
• PHP 5 reaches 38.93% of PHP market share, up 2%
• They passed the mark of 30 millions domain tested this month

You can get the full stats (including the numbers and some great graphs) from the Nexen.net website - full stats, evolution stats.

In a new post Michael Kimsal does a good job comparing the rise of PHP5 (and what it brought with it) to his language of choice these days - Groovy.

I remember when PHP5 first came out having 'discussions' with a number of people who insisted that PHP5 was way better than 4. [...] Basically, intentions were made clearer with things like "public protected private" (PPP),but I have not yet seen any web project get done faster or dare I say even much *better* due to those sorts of things. [...] This isn't specifically saying PPP is necessarily bad, but that PHP could have addressed the issue in a fashion more suitable to dynamic languages. Keep reading for an example.

His comparison is to how Groovy handles properties in a class - everything is private unless declared otherwise. This could be ported (somewhat) over to PHP and would eliminate the need to search&replace all over the code for the right variables.