Another year has passed, and yet again we find ourselves reflecting on what has happened in the world of PHP over the past year. Let's take a moment to look back over our 2012 predictions and see how close we were!

Trends and technologies mentioned in the retrospective include:

• Framework Convergence
• Serious Caching
• Composer
• Best Practices
• PHP Closures

Their "look ahead" predictions to what's coming in 2013 include things like an emphasis on content as a service, improvements to dependency injection containers and a push for BDD testing with PHPSpec and Behat.

Now that I've been working with Ruby in much more depth and both PHP and Ruby have matured dramatically over the past five years it is time to reevaluate the comparison. The previous article was primarily centered around the languages themselves and was not a showdown between any particular frameworks. In this review we will touch a bit more on frameworks, but in the context of a high level review of the two different landscapes of PHP vs Ruby for web development. We will not be getting down to feature-by-feature detail.

He talks a bit about the history and purpose of each of the languages and a good bit about the web frameworks that are available for each (hint: the PHP options are quite a bit more). He also talks about web hosting vs web application hosting and then compares the two languages with a "score card".

The bottom line, as always, is pick the solution that is right for you and your development team. My hope is that this article was helpful in shedding some light on the strengths of both PHP and Ruby, spreading the word about what is available to both languages, and helping you decide what is right for your next project.

2011 has flown by in a blur as we have been busy helping many new clients with large scale PHP projects - proof that PHP continues to gain traction with enterprise. [...] The ongoing financial climate only adds pressure for IT managers to cut costs and deliver more value from their existing infrastructure and therefore require enterprises to re-consider any prior aversion to open source and PHP. This is allowing our industry to consistently buck the trend of the markets and expand to support the increased demand.

They list some of the changes in PHP itself, like the Release Candidates for PHP 5.4 and the 5.3 requirements of some frameworks, as well as some community-related changes: Facebook's Virtual PHP Machine (hhvm) and the number of PHP-related events in Europe and the UK. They mention some projects that become more prominent in 2011 including BDD testing, Platform as a Service products and the EBay acquisition of Magento.

Also included in the post are a few predictions for 2012 including a possible merging of frameworks along similar strategies, the increased use of dependency injection containers and a serious look into caching in PHP applications.