Doug Hill has decided to start a series on his blog that details some of the happenings in the PHP community for the past week, of which this is the first:

I spend way too much time reading blogs, surfing PHP and web development articles online. I resolve to cut back but things just sneak back into my reader somehow, and believe me dzone doesn't help. But I've came up with a way to justify all that time, I call it research.

He mentions things like the infamous CIO article, Zend's Jolt Award, comparing the Zend Framework versus PEAR and PHP releases, books and various other language-related tidbits.

Check out the post for more and keep an eye on Doug's blog for future weekly summaries.

In his latest, Andrei Zmievski talks a bit about an article over on the Ohloh.net website (statistics site that analyzes the source of Open Source applications) titled "PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast".

So far they've indexed over 3,000 projects and their conclusion seems to be that among Web scripting languages, PHP is the undisputed champion (as measured by the LOC count).

He also notes that they've discovered something interesting - despite the lowering numbers of developers/projects being done with PHP, the code and applications seem to be growing still. Andrei interprets this as a positive move for developers away from the "reinvent the wheel" school of thought to a more "find something that works already and go from there".

Check out the original article for more information on the stats and some charts to show the trends.

The Professional PHP blog has created a few graphs with the help of the Google Trends site comparing the usage of four different languages - PHP, Java, C#, and Perl - represented by a handfull of graphs.

The graphs show that, besides Java's stats slowly dropping and PHP holding steady, Ruby still just doesn't compare to the two, and Ruby on Rails even less. What's interesting is the move from more Struts-style frameworks to more of a "Ruby clone" setup, with the gap only widening as things go along. Also, on a slightly related note, the results for Ajax versus Javascript are showing an ever-widening gap - in favor of Ajax.

DynamicWebPages.de has posted some information about PHP's presence at this year's LinuxTag Conference where there will be no official PHP track, but will be several PHP-related talks.