Stuart Herbert On PHP

I’ve been running a series of polls as research for a new conference talk that I’m currently putting together. The first two polls have had over 1,200 votes between them so far, which is a fantastic response! Now I just need your help with one final poll

Please vote on twtpoll to let me know where will you get your PHP 5.3 from? Many thanks in advance!

A huge thank you to everyone who voted in my last poll about when you’ll adopt PHP 5.3, and everyone who has provided feedback on the problems caused by the way individual distros package PHP. I’ve had much more feedback than I could have hoped for! This is all useful research for a new conference talk that I’m preparing.

My next question for the PHP community is about where you’ll use PHP 5.3. I’m wondering: which server platforms you’ll choose to put PHP 5.3 on when the time comes? This new poll is multi-choice, allowing you to vote for all of the operating systems that you choose.

Many thanks in advance for your answers

As part of the research I’m doing for a new conference talk, I’m running a poll to find out when people are planning to switch to PHP 5.3. After the very slow uptake of PHP 5.0, I’m very curious to see how quickly PHP 5.3 will be adopted.

Many thanks!

I’m putting together a new conference talk, and I’d like your help and input.

Most Linux distributions ship with packages for PHP, but not everyone is happy with these packages. If you’re not happy with the PHP packages for a specific Linux distro (no matter how obscure), I’d love to hear what you think the problems are and (if possible) what the correct solution should be.

If you have something to say on this, please leave a comment below.

Came across a second Microsoft-sponsored competition aimed at showcasing PHP on Windows. This one is for Canadian residents, and is headlined ‘The Ultimate Coder Battle‘. The premise is quite interesting: one student and one professional developer will be the chosen finalists, and they will battle head to head at the “Make Web Not War” conference. The winner walks away with substantial cash prizes – $5000 with another $5000 in bonus awards available. Entries close 3rd June.

After many many years of pushing ASP and ASP.net, I’m finding it fascinating to watch Microsoft push Windows as a viable platform for publishing PHP applications. Although PHP apps on Windows have been viable for many years (provided you ditched the fundamentally-flawed ISAPI approach and stuck with the slower-but-stable CGI route), I think it’s great to see the improvements that are being made both to PHP and IIS. From personal experience, I know it can be very difficult to sell PHP-based apps into organisations that choose Windows; being able to point at Microsoft’s support for PHP is a good thing for the ISV community.