Over on Cedric Otaku's weblog today there's a new posting concerning his first impressions of PHP coming from the Java world.

I spent that last few days revamping a Web site and I took this opportunity to learn PHP, which has been an interesting experience.

[...] Picking PHP was a no-brainer. First because it is supported by my ISP but also because I had always wanted to learn it and find out what all the buzz was about. I expected the experience to be painless and...surprisingly, it was. Way beyond my expectations.

PHP's main strength is its very regular syntax and a few details that make it extremely well suited for the Web. [...] Not surprisingly, developing with PHP is very similar to JSP: you end up concatenating pieces of static HTML with dynamic PHP and this speeds up prototyping quite a bit.

The entry goes on talking more about a few of the slight differences that might trip up Java programmers making the transition. Overall, though, it seems like his experience was quite a pleasant one - one he even seems to want to continue (in a discussion of the PHP/MySQL API).

Thanks to PHP Magazine for the pointer...