In this new post to his Drupal Motion site, David Corbacho shares some statistics about why PHP "isn't dead yet" and that despite the slow adoption of the latest versions of the language, it's still as popular as it ever was.

This is a follow-up on the article Dries Buytaert wrote in 2007 PHP is dead... long live PHP!. In the article he shared same concern that Nick Lewis for the slow adoption rate of PHP 5, less than 20% at that time. And he encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5. [...] Well, PHP 5 adoption rate is 96.9%, and PHP 4 is quite dead. Mission accomplished. Let's have a look to the overall PHP health.

He shares data from a few sources about the popularity and adoption of PHP in applications/sites all across the web. Sources include Netcraft survey results, W3Tech usage summaries and Stack Overflow tagging matches (complete with graphs of each set of data).

According to this new report on the W3 Techs site, the usage of PHP 5.2 has been passed up by the numbers for the usage of PHP 5.3 (finally).

PHP 5.3 has been released in June 2009, so it took a while to gain that level of popularity. End of support for PHP 5.2 has been declared in December 2010, but is was still the most popular version until now. Version 5.3 will enter the end-of-life cycle in March 2013. Version 5.4, used by only 3.0%, is now considered state-of-the-art.

The numbers have been consistently trending towards intersection with the usage of PHP 5.4 picking up, but no where near the 5.3 and 5.2 numbers. They also point out that PHP version adoption has a history of being slow. Contributing factors to this could be the overall impression of the language and how much "room for improvement" it seems to have.

It's not difficult to predict that PHP as a language will continue to dominate web development in the near future. What will be more exciting is to watch what new versions of PHP will look like.

On the Udemy blog there's a new post with a large infographic showing "who reigns supreme" comparing Ruby, Python and PHP (don't worry, this isn't flamebait...it's actual good stats comparing the state of these three languages).

Just as the Japanese, Spanish and French languages are uniquely different, programming languages also have their variations, some more popular and easier to use than others. With the recent introduction of some new ones, there is a 'war' of modern day languages. What's easier and faster to use is not always the best option.

The graphic includes stats like:

• Usability ratings
• Popularity in the TIOBE index
• How much it's discussed (from the IEEE Spectrum, IRC)
• The number of open job postings
• Average run time/lines of code

Check out the full post for more interesting data.

Ilia Alshanetsky has posted the next article in his "domains and PHP" series - a new slicing of the data showing the ISP popularity by domain counts, a breakdown of the top 25 with over 100,000 domains to their credit.

The results are pretty interesting, and it clearly shows that a small number of ISPs are definitely doing something right, which is causing many consumers to vote with their dollars in those ISPs favor. As usual the information is shown in graph form, to filter down the data to just the large providers I've set a minimum at 100,000 domains, leaving me with just 122 ISPs. The image [below] shows the break-down of the Top 25.

He's created a pie graph that breaks down the ISP list with GoDaddy once again coming in top of the list and The Planet coming in second. The numbers behind the graph are also included with other things like IP, country, region and city for each. He also mentions other major breakdowns like the top ranking IP addresses and the total number of around 80,000 IPs that have over 100 domains resolving to them.

Ilia Alshanetsky has posted the next set of results from his domains-running-PHP research he's been doing. In this latest post he looks at the domain distribution by city mostly falling in the US, Europe and China.

I am making available two additional geographic chats that breakdown the domain distribution by top world cities. The first chart a preview of which can been below (click to see full, browse-able/zoomable version) shows the Top 150 cities, by domain distribution. These cities represent a total 91.3% of some 102 million domains that could be resolved to a city level.

The top ranking city falls in the US in Scottsdale, Arizona (because of the large domain provider GoDaddy being based there) with the second place spot going to San Francisco, California. He's created both a interactive map you can use to see the numbers for different parts of the world and a concentration view of the same results making it a bit easier to digest.

Ilia Alshanetsky has started to gather more and more information about PHP usage on the web as a whole (that was started here) and has been extended with some additional statistics he's done on the location of the domains he's collected.

The first step of the process has been resolving all of these domains, which is now complete. The next step is fetching the server information, which began, but will take some time to finish. However, even from the domain revolving data there is a lot of useful data to be gleamed, which is what I am now publishing. My first focus was on the world-wide distribution on these TLDs, which at least for me held a few surprises.

He includes a few graphs of the results he's found showing things like:

• The US has the most domains hosted followed with less than half by Germany
• The overwhelming majority of the PHP domains are in the .com area
• In the US, the state with the highest number of PHP-powered domains was Arizona with Clifornia coming in second

If you'd like something more interactive, he's also come up with a clickable world map of the results for you to click around on.

Raphael Stolt has a new blog post today looking at his method for measuing Phing build times with the help of a Ruby gem called buildhawk.

Recently I installed a Ruby gem called buildhawk which allows to measure and display the build times of Rake driven builds. As I like the idea behind this tool a lot but mostly use Phing for build orchestration, it was time to explore the possibility to interconnect them both. In this blog post I'll show an implementation of an apposite Phing Logger gathering the buildhawk compatible build times via git note(s) and how to put the interplay between those two tools to work.

He includes the script you'll need to get his example set up - a new logger for Phing that works directly with Buildhawk and stores the information directly into a git note. He includes an example of running the phing build with it enabled and some of the results as exported as an HTML document.

On the Web Development Blog there's a recent post that shows you how to, with a simple bit of code, pull out the most popular posts to your WordPress blog.

Since I'm using WordPress.com Stats, I would like to use the rankings generated by this service or plugin. Searching Google, I found some widget called "WordPress.com Stats: Top Posts Widget" which works out of the box (if like to use a widget). In my case I have a custom sidebar with different custom sections using custom code. The following example explains how-to use that code on your website.

WordPress, by default, doesn't track any statistic information about the posts on your site, so you'll need something like the WordPress Stats plugin to get that part working. Once that's there, you can use his code to pull out the posts from the last few days (configurable) and show the most popular of the list.

Koen Kuipers of the FinishJoomla.com site pointed us to a new post that gives some usage numbers about how many groups out there are using the popular content management system to power their sites.

We all know that Joomla is a tremendously popular CMS. In the past several attempts have been made to estimate the number of websites using Joomla. While these attempts were worthy contributions to the discussion, all of them were using their own methods and therefore had their own shortcomings. Several of the earlier attempts will be discussed and a new method for estimating the number of websites that use Joomla will be presented.

They look at the methods used by previous studies and how their method is different using this "new method". They've broken it down by number of sites, then number of domains, then total number of active domains based on publicly available statistics from other groups. In the end, out of the huge number of sites available on the web today, they came up with the number of around 1.5 to 2 million of them to be running Joomla.

Since the Symfony framework project has such tight integration with both the Propel and Doctrine ORM layers, they thought they'd share some statistics on the usage of both as mapped through the stats from their Jobeet tutorial.

As for any Open-Source community, it's not easy to find metrics that tell you what people use and how they use it. You can measure the number of tickets for a specific feature, count the number of people asking for help on Propel or Doctrine. But for the Propel vs Doctrine question, we have two more reliable metrics.

As is shown in this graph of the total Jobeet traffic in 2009, Doctrine is winning by a long shot. That's not to say that you can't still use Propel is that's what you and your application are using, this is just showing the overall popularity of each of the ORMs.