The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post sharing the current state of PHP MVC frameworks in 2017. The article doesn't focus on any particular list of frameworks (though the more popular ones are used in the examples) and instead focus on the overall trends they've seen in frameworks and their use.

A simple question prompted me to sit down and write this follow up to my article from about a year ago: "Any thoughts about where things are today?"

He suggests that, while several of the major frameworks are still in active development and are seeing new features in recent versions, the front-runners are probably Laravel and Symfony. He includes trend numbers to back this up (popularity, basically) but also briefly touches on others: CakePHP, CodeIgniter and Zend Framework 2. He then breaks it down into two groups: Symfony/Laravel and "the rest". The post wraps up with a look at the rise of microservices, the "destruction of the monolith" and a more recent emphasis on scalability over just features.

Joshua Thijssen has an interesting post to his site talking about Benford's Law, related to digits and how frequently they would appear in results based on significance.

In a new talk I’m currently presenting at conferences and meetups, I talk – amongst other things – about Benford’s law. This law states that in natural occurring numbers, the first digit of those numbers will most often start with a 1 (around 30% of the time), and logarithmically drops down to the number 9, which occurs only 5% of the time.

[...] Even though there is no guarantee that something will actually follow Benford’s law, a lot of things do, and in fact, it can be used for things like fraud detection: in your taxes, in elections, but basically anything concerning numbers. [...] But anyway, I wanted to see Benford’s law in action for myself, so I’ve come up with a simple test: Take a (PHP) framework, and count the line-numbers for each PHP file in the framework.

He shares the script (well, command) he uses to get these counts and how he did the sorting to help make some sense out of the results. He includes some of the results and graphs showing them to help visualize the Benford’s "curve" the results take. Interestingly enough, most of them follow the trend very closely with only slight variances for Zend Framework v2 and only them because it fluctuates more, nothing to do with the quality of the framework.

In a recent post to his blog Rob Diana has posted a summary he's created of Indeed.com and SimplyHired.

August is one of the months that I devote to job trends. Last week I focused on the Python, PHP, JavaScript, Flex and Groovy.

According to the results on Indeed Javascript is in huge demand right now, completely overshadowing the others on the list. PHP came in second here. The results from SimplyHired show a similar story, but the gap between Javascript and second place - Flex - is a bit smaller. PHP came in third here.

On his Ibuildings blog today Ivo Jansch has posted some of his thoughts on the recent trends he's seeing both in the PHP community and in the wider world of online development.

[Two] weeks ago, Ibuildings organised the fourth Dutch PHP Conference in the RAI centre in Amsterdam. DPC is a way for us to help PHP developers learn new skills and improve existing ones, but it is also an excellent way to get experts from around the world together and learn about current trends in the PHP ecosystem.

Topics mentioned include the unofficial naming of PHP 5.3.99, CouchDB/NoSQL, an emphasis on web services, plenty of talk on best practices for PHP development and a growing trend about security in general for all web-based applications.

On their twitter account (a href="http://twitter.com/phpmagnet">phpmagnet) PHP Magazine have been conducting a survey of PHP frameworks and their popularity through out the community. They've gathered these statistics together into one trending page.

The data below is generated automatically from twitter. To cast your voice you can simply send a reply to @phpmagnet with frameworks you use, like, or suggest.

As it stands at the time of this post, Drupal seems to be at the top of the "interest" charts with CakePHP coming in second and Symfony in third. Zend Framework tops all three lists (Suggest/Like/Use) in popularity. You can read more about the project here.

Lars Strojny has posted a leaflet to his blog looking at some of the PHP development practices that should be encouraged in 2009. The list includes:

• Developments to object-oriented code practices
• Using a VCS
• Continuous deployment
• More code testing
• More use of rapid application development tools
• Monitoring of production systems
• Bytecode caching
• and more...

These are just some suggestions of things to look towards including the best if them all - "love your code".

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.

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.