It's a moderately simple app that provides a vehicle for quickly dropping other developers' code in your codebase. Many of the packages on GetSparks are very well maintained. I am continually impressed by the amount of effort spark developers pour into their submissions when I peruse the site and try new packages out. [...] GetSparks has almost clocked 50,000 package downloads at this point, but there are handful of sparks that have really stood out in terms of popularity.

Packages in the top ten list by popularity include (in no particular order) php-activerecord, template, gravatar_helper and markdown. He also thanks a few of the folks that have made the GetSparks.org site what it is.

Today Rasmus mentioned that he received a $500 offer for the php.net domain name. Discussion ensued, which ultimately led to the indisputable belief that php.net is worth over 10 million US dollars. Therefore, let's think about this further...

He compares the worth of several popular languages (with a "reliable source") and does some math where PHP.net account holders would profit from the popularity over other languages. On a bit more serious note, though, he points out a few ways that you can contribute or get involved in the PHP project on several fronts:

• Help by editing documentation
• Sign up for a mailing list or three
• Get a SVN account and start contributing back to the code

A disclaimer: creating this poll was a bit of a catch-22, as I could not include all PHP frameworks (would have been a very long list) and had to make a selection based on popularity; of course that meant a guess by using Twitter and google results, but the ultimate popularity of the framework, at least in the audience of Web Builder Zone, would only be established by a poll. I thank you for the participation and the suggestions: we had more than one thousand votes, and this means we gathered responses from a statistically valid sample of the PHP community.

According to the results, the Zend Framework comes in at first place with Symfony and CodeIgniter coming in just behind. CakePHP was in fourth and "Other" in fifth. He points out that the top three frameworks all have something in common - they're all company-backed, but still derive a large part of their contributions from the community.

I decided to take a look and see what was going on behind the scenes by reading on the index definition to see if I could understand what happened. After reading through the definition I still don't know what happened, or even why it happened.

He goes through how the index data is created - search results from the top 6 hits in Alexa for each language result - and how he, basically, found nothing out of the ordinary. He points out that, because of inconsistencies like this, the TIOBE index shouldn't be regarded as much more than a loose guide. Since it's based on hard-coded search strings, it'll never be a true judge of "popularity" overall.

[Manuel Lemos, Ernani Joppert and Rochak Chauhan] also discuss the latest developments of the TIOBE programming languages ranking. The latest numbers seem to suggest that languages like Python and C# are gaining popularity supposedly at the expense of an apparent loss of interest on PHP.

The ranking their referring to can be found here. You can listen to this new episode either through their in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. There's also the complete transcript if you'd like a text-only version.

The results are pretty interesting, and it clearly shows that a small number of ISPs are definitely doing something right, which is causing many consumers to vote with their dollars in those ISPs favor. As usual the information is shown in graph form, to filter down the data to just the large providers I've set a minimum at 100,000 domains, leaving me with just 122 ISPs. The image [below] shows the break-down of the Top 25.

He's created a pie graph that breaks down the ISP list with GoDaddy once again coming in top of the list and The Planet coming in second. The numbers behind the graph are also included with other things like IP, country, region and city for each. He also mentions other major breakdowns like the top ranking IP addresses and the total number of around 80,000 IPs that have over 100 domains resolving to them.

In their latest analysis PHP has entered the top 3 of most popular programming languages, and that is something that both makes us proud and provides further proof that PHP is still growing and here to stay. [...] What makes PHP's number 3 position remarkable is that the numbers 1 and 2 are very much general purpose languages. Java and C are pretty much used from anywhere from low level processes to desktop applications.

Some of the other languages in their top ten (according to their indexing tools) include Perl, Python, Ruby and Javascript.

[Remi] was expressing his surprise at how few people participated: "I refuse to believe there are only a couple of dozen PHP developers in Europe." It's an odd statement...the world and his dog knows that PHP is immensely popular over here in Europe. Perhaps Remi completely overlooked the Windows factor here?

Stuart points out that he's seen around fifteen percent of developers using Windows as a development platform, but only three percent use it as production server. There also seems to be a lack of interest in the whole PHP-on-Windows space.

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. [...] PHP enters top 3 for the first time.

PHP pushed ahead of now number four on the list, C++, with an almost one percent gain jumping up from number five on the previous month's list. The post includes graphs showing the trends and a link to the definition of the reports.