On his blog today, Johnathan Street poses a question - is PHP "good enough" to be used in the scientific community?

There is an accelerating trend in Biology to make data and tools available via web interfaces. In my opinion this is an environment where PHP excels and yet all the literature I've seen discussing the development of these services uses Perl or occasionally Java.

He came across two science-related PEAR packages that were created back in 2003, but not too much since then. He wonders if there's anyone else out there that might feel like PHP is a perfect fit for some of the sort of applications the scientific community could need.

So my question is this. Is anyone out there using PHP in a scientific environment? Are there resources available which I've missed?