On 04/11/02 00:44 +0000, Paul Makepeace wrote: > I dunno, in light of reports like the one on LWN I'm struggling to see > this. > > "PHP Overtakes Microsoft's ASP as Web's #1 Server-side Scripting > Language": http://lwn.net/Articles/1433/ > > "According to a Netcraft survey published in April 2002, PHP is now > being used by over 24% of the sites on the Internet. Of the 37.6 million > web sites reported worldwide > (http://www.netcraft.com/Survey/index-200204.html), PHP is running on > over 9 million sites and continues to grow at an explosive rate. Over > the past two years PHP has averaged a 6.5% monthly growth rate." > > That's an enormous number of hobby sites :-)
Current or ex-Netcrafters can correct me if I'm wrong, but the netcraft survey basically asks the http server what it's actually running, and so these figures are, pretty much, simply taken from distinct domains with an apache reporting that it has mod_php loaded. There are 2 major points with this: 1) Whilst mod_perl shows up in the same way, there's no direct way of Netcraft collecting data on vanilla apache servers which are being used with perl scripts (CGI.pm-enabled or otherwise). 2) Many servers, especially those at bulk hosting companies running virtual hosts for people, will be compiled with mod_php by default. Whether it's actually used by any/all of the sites on the box is a different point. The statistics may not be that accurate, basically. Having said that, I don't doubt that PHP is popular, and that it's very useful for a lot of people in a lot of situations. Personally I haven't used it very much (my old not-quite-dormant company has a couple of sites running geeklog, but that's pretty much someone else's responsibility), and I like the flexibility and power that I have with perl, especially combined with DBI and TT. Each to their own, horses for courses, and a bunch of other cliches...
