The folks over at Kinsta.com have put together some end of the year usage statistics for PHP across the web trying to answer the "is PHP dead?" question.

You’ve probably heard about how the new WordPress Gutenberg editor brings block-based editing to WordPress.

There is a change going on behind the scenes that casual users might not notice, that Gutenberg blocks are made using JavaScript (React, JSX, and ES6), not PHP. That change, along with other shifts in web development, might have you wondering, “is PHP dead?”.

People have been calling for the death of PHP for years now (you can find “Is PHP Dead?” posts as far back as 2011). And yet, PHP still persists… In this post, we’ll dig into the data and show how PHP isn’t close to being dead (even if you really wish it were).

The article talks about how, despite PHP not being the "most modern programming language", it's still in use by almost 80% of the websites on the internet (8 out of 10 sites). While the number is declining slightly, it's still large chunk of the web based on the reporting from the X-Powered-By header. They also point out that PHP is faster and better than ever with new, impressive features being added constantly and new versions being regularly released.

They also note that it's easy to find PHP developers (with actual experience) and, while you don't have to like PHP, it's definitely far from being dead.

Anthony Ferrara has a new post to his site sharing the results of some PHP version statistics he's gathered and how it relates back to the security of applications.

After yesterday's post, I decided to do some math to see how many PHP installs had at least 1 known security vulnerability. So I went to grab statistics from W3Techs, and correlated that with known Linux Distribution supported numbers. I then whipped up a spreadsheet and got some interesting numbers out of it. So interesting, that I need to share...

He starts with the versions that currently have no known security issues and matches those up with the linux releases that currently include them. He then looks at the adoption rates for more recent versions and maps those against the security status as well...with some "grim results". He summarizes the totals of all of the version results and comes up with an interesting statistic: over 78 percent of PHP installations (and thus applications) are vulnerable to some kind of security vulnerabilities just because of what they're hosted on.

The mystery has been relealed - the php|architect folks have posted about their secret today - a discount on single issues of 30%.

Seasons greetings everyone! The first of two surprises from us today is a great opportunity to combine our recent drop of all DRM protection on our PDFs with an awesome 30% discount on our single-issue prices to stock up on all your favourite past issues of php|architect.

This means that single issues are priced at (about) $3.49 CAD for a few days - all you need to do is pick your favorites from their archive, even their most recent issue.

The mystery has been relealed - the php|architect folks have posted about their secret today - a discount on single issues of 30%.

Seasons greetings everyone! The first of two surprises from us today is a great opportunity to combine our recent drop of all DRM protection on our PDFs with an awesome 30% discount on our single-issue prices to stock up on all your favourite past issues of php|architect.

This means that single issues are priced at (about) $3.49 CAD for a few days - all you need to do is pick your favorites from their archive, even their most recent issue.

Congratulations are in order to Jim Plush for him and his MyBic PHP/Ajax framework. They made it up to the top one percent of SourceForge projects in the span of four days.

I'm happy to say the My-Bic AJAX/PHP framework has been well accepted by the SourceForge community. Of 117,000+ projects on SourceForge MyBic has jumped to #1000 in just 4 days and is climbing each day. The new features of My-Bic have made it a top contender for ajax enabled php applications. Development continues on the project to further support the needs of the casual developer's home page as well as the enterprise needs of a full web-based desktop application.

He follows this with a listing of the latest features of the current version (0.6) of the framework, including an install of only three files, the EasyForms functionality, built-in network issue handling, and a simple two lines of Javascript to use the library.

Congratulations are in order to Jim Plush for him and his MyBic PHP/Ajax framework. They made it up to the top one percent of SourceForge projects in the span of four days.

I'm happy to say the My-Bic AJAX/PHP framework has been well accepted by the SourceForge community. Of 117,000+ projects on SourceForge MyBic has jumped to #1000 in just 4 days and is climbing each day. The new features of My-Bic have made it a top contender for ajax enabled php applications. Development continues on the project to further support the needs of the casual developer's home page as well as the enterprise needs of a full web-based desktop application.

He follows this with a listing of the latest features of the current version (0.6) of the framework, including an install of only three files, the EasyForms functionality, built-in network issue handling, and a simple two lines of Javascript to use the library.

Jim Plush wanted to try a little experiment with perfomance in PHP - specifically dealing with the placement of the class code in an application.

Out of sheer boredom I wanted to see which was better, including one big file of classes or splitting your classes up into multiple files. I'm going to use nusoap as an example. The NuSoap package lets you download one file. nusoap.php. That one file contains 9 classes. While not only is this method nice as you only need to include one class, its also 24% faster on average than having to include 9 seperate files.

In his informal testing he found that combining the files/classes into a single large file made for better performance (as far as object usage) - of course, that also makes it harder to maintain...

Jim Plush wanted to try a little experiment with perfomance in PHP - specifically dealing with the placement of the class code in an application.

Out of sheer boredom I wanted to see which was better, including one big file of classes or splitting your classes up into multiple files. I'm going to use nusoap as an example. The NuSoap package lets you download one file. nusoap.php. That one file contains 9 classes. While not only is this method nice as you only need to include one class, its also 24% faster on average than having to include 9 seperate files.

In his informal testing he found that combining the files/classes into a single large file made for better performance (as far as object usage) - of course, that also makes it harder to maintain...