In this post to his PHPJack blog Richard Heyes comments on the trending he's seeing in the Zend Framework and where its future might lie.

I have been critical of ZF in the past because the performance has pretty much been going down every release and I am not the only one seeing this, there have been a number of benchmarks that show this trend. Having contributed to ZF in the past I brought this issue up multiple times both on the mailing list and even during the meetings the past zendcons and it the general response was they where focusing on features not performance.

He points out a few things that were brought up at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo including the performance focus of future releases, a push to 2.0 after PHP 5.3's release and some of the changes that can cause breaks in backwards compatibility.

Be sure to also check out Matthew Weier O'Phinney's response to the post and some of the comments Richard made.

Damien Seguy has posted the latest statistics for PHP's usage for the month of March 2008. Here's some of the highlights:

• There were no surprises, only data reinforcing already set trends
• PHP 5 now make up over a third of all PHP installations to date
• More installations moved up to PHP versions 5.2.5 and 4.4.8
• Apache has almost reached 70% of the web server market share

You can check out the full details on this month's stats page including the evolution stats over on Nexen.net.

As mentioned by the International PHP Magazine site, the latest results for the TIOBE Programming Community Index poll are in for January and it looks like PHP has lost some ground.

PHP, previously in the number four slot, has been superseded by Visual Basic by a decent margin (a difference of 1.18%). This shows as a drop in popularity (as measured by the survey) to be trending back down to where it was around the middle of 2005. It still remains in the top five, though, in a close race with Visual Basic and C++ for those three positions.

The full language list and graph showing the trends back to 2002 can be found on the TIOBE website.

Content no longer valid

In this post from Jason Norwood-Young, he shares his opinions on the lifespan of PHP - that maybe, just maybe, PHP has passed its prime.

A friend recently told me that PHP is on its way out, Ruby on Rails is where it's at. I scoffed. I chuckled. Then I gave it some thought. Could PHP have had its day?

[After my research] I have to conclude that my friend might be right in one respect - PHP has had its day. If the trend continues, it means that PHP will one day not be the hottest thing on the web like it is right now.

He's not abandoning ship just yet, though - he notes that:

PHP still has plenty of legs, and it will take quite a bit to wind it. I'm not sure what will take its place, but somehow I don't think Ruby on Rails will be the successor. PHP's advantage over the rest is that it's a web application, through and through. It doesn't try to also be a desktop application language, a server application language, a widget application language... it just spits out web pages fast and efficiently.

PHP just keeps growing and growing - popularity is back on the rise and DynamicWebPages.de has the statistics to prove it.

In breaking down the statistics for the period of December 2005 through January 2006, over 1.9 million domains are using PHP, and the number only continues to climb. In February, the upward trend continued and usage jumped up 1 million domains more. March, however, has only seen about 100,000 additional domains making the total 21,439,178. On the server side of things there's never much fluctuation and it still sits steady around the 1.3 million mark.

PHP usage took a hit in usage around the beginning of the year, but it's coming back quickly and will soon be back up to the 23 million domain usage soon.