In this latest post on the Professional PHP blog today, Jeff Moore asks the question "Why isn't PHP the natural successor to Java?"

Loud thinking declares that Java has lost its aura of invincibility. Jason Hunter sums it up nicely: "Ruby on Rails today looks poised to eat Java's mindshare on the web tier. If not Rails, then something else."

It does seem like Java's mindshare is on the decline, along with sun's fortunes. So why isn't PHP that something else?

He talks about the decision to move from PHP to Ruby for rails development, some reasons why PHP "might not appeal to the agile method", and a simple statement that's as true today as it will be years from now:

The success of Ruby and Rails does not diminish the success of PHP. The cool kids were doing Java and now some of them are doing Ruby. Oh, well. Its disappointing that more of them aren't doing PHP, but PHP has many things going for it.