PHP's Prospects and trends

BURLINGAME, Calif message: The simplicity of the PHP scripting language makes it easier to popularize and popularize in Web applications than Java, the pioneer of internet browsing, Marc Andreessen, predicted in Zend/php's Wednesday speech.

Andreessen (Anderson) said: "Since 1995, Sun Microsystems launched and released Java, Java has been a great success, mainly because Java has more of its language advantage in the application of programmers, rather than on the machine, This makes software development difficult to reduce significantly. However, Andreessen also mentions that Java has now added a lot of less-than-favorite features compared to the previous ones.

Java has been easier to use in the past few years than C and C + +, until recently it has become more complex. Andreessen mentions that some people now think it is even harder to learn than C + +. The simplicity of the (Java) era is over: "PHP is now evolving in a more favorable environment than Java." ”

These views may not be endorsed by Java advocates-most of them come from the Java community, which consists of millions of programmers and hundreds of companies that control the future of software.

But even at IBM, senior executives who have put Java into servers and Java-core WebSphere Server Software are now seeing the advantages of PHP beyond Java.

Simplicity is its greatest feature. "In a report, PHP has attracted IBM's attention," said Rod Smith, vice president of IBM's developing IT group. "They do not focus on adding language features to compete with other languages," instead of "in a simple way, rather than the unfortunate way we have done in Java." “

PHP is an open-source software that includes an engine that simplifies the process of invoking PHP scripts, and a large pre-built script library. Many of the developments are controlled by Zend, which also sells PHP packages, programming tools and services.

Fanatical programmers are not new in the computer world, insisting on building their own products as a benchmark platform. In fact, Microsoft has many popular, developer-friendly programming tools, whose success is largely due to the Windows platform.

PHP has been widely used, and currently has about 22 million web pages using PHP, the number is still growing steadily. About 450 programmers have the authority to audit software improvements. The main companies that use PHP include Yahoo, Lufthansa and Deutsche Telekom ' s t-online.

PHP is much narrower than Java, and (Java) is not only available for Web servers, but also for PCs, mobile phones, pay cards with chips, and much more. Some of the Java technologies, such as JSP, do the same thing as PHP.

"Java and PHP are at the same competitive level (Java) now leading" Eclipse's general manager, Mikemilinkovich, said in a report. Eclipse is an open source programming tool that supports Java for a long time and now supports PHP. "I'm looking forward to PHP being able to catch up on the market (Java)." “

Java and PHP are also moving closer together. Oracle, as a company that sells both Java Server Software and its own database software, can also be used in Java or PHP, and is one of those enterprises that are committed to helping PHP in addition to serving Java. Kenjacobs, vice president of Oracle Product strategy, said at a meeting that Java's 223 feature requirements "will help bridge the Java community and the PHP community." ”

Even Andreessen, he has just helped launch an application called Ning, which is used to exchange pictures, information and other content online, as well as to know the status of Java.

"My new company is trying to integrate Java and PHP. It takes a lot of input. "He spoke of their technical decisions. "The core of our system is java." Just like an OS, like a system programming project. There's an application layer on top of it--everything you see is actually done in PHP. ”

PHP, like Linux and Apache open source projects, has now been favored by the computer industry giants. IBM and Oracle are working to get PHP apps to extract information from their databases, and their endorsement is very important, Zend CEO Doron Gerstel said.

"The fact that IBM and Oracle support IT-gives the IT user A (huge) assurance of confidence." Giants support it, it must be a good thing, "Gerstel said in a report.

PHP is expected to launch in early November (Translator Note: This article is written in 05) in the new version 5.1, will include a faster engine to deal with PHP script, PHP creator and Zend co-founder Zeev Suraski said. It will also include a low-level "data abstraction layer" to facilitate PHP and different database connections, a high-level layer for the exchange of XML data, which generates and serves Web service components (Web services).

Version 6, expected to be launched in 2006, will support Unicode character decoding, (Unicode) support for a wide range of letters, making the system more easily implemented by multinational applications