In a new post to his blog Marco Tabini has voiced his opinion on the decision made by the PHP development group to set the end of life of the PHP 5.2.x series with the latest release (5.2.14).

n case you missed it, the PHP team has just released 5.2.14, which effectively ends active support for the 5.2 branch. [...] The logic behind this decision is...puzzling.

He mentions the recent announcements of a few large PHP-based projects to officially support PHP 5.2 and how, because of the large jump in functionality from pre-5.2, it might be a good idea to reconsider this (preemptive?) retirement. He adds that making a move like this without consideration to these larger products could reflect negatively on the language itself. Be sure to check out the comments for more views from other members of the community.

Nessa has a new post to her blog today on why she thinks most people are late to the party on PHP 5.3 including a few reasons she sees for the delayed adoption among the developer masses.

As a programmer, I would hold it to any site owner to check their site's requirements and the offerings of their host before they unnecessarily waste a lot of time and money, but as a system administrator I frown upon shared hosting providers offering software with known compatibility issues just to be able to advertise as the '�latest and greatest'�. The latest isn't always the greatest, and it won't be until the community catches up with what the greatest has to offer.

She notes that her situation, much like many other hosting companies, is that they're "just not ready" to make the upgrade because of some of the hassle it might cause the users. Similar situations happened with the change from PHP4 to PHP5. She also mentions a few specific issues:

• Compatibility issues - several very popular applications don't support some of the 5.3 changes
• There no Zend Optimizer/Zend Guard support
• It's not required for PCI compliance yet

Court Ewing has put together a new post looking at using one of the more powerful (yet underused) features of the recent PHP releases - namespaces - to organize your code.

Prefixes serve their primary purpose well: when used correctly, they will ensure that your class names do not have naming conflicts. Unfortunately, they are long and pedantic, and provide no additional benefits. [...] Namespaces provide other benefits than shorter class names, though.

He illustrates with a well-structured example that makes it clear as to what resources are being used and how they're split out. His snippet defines the structure of the rest of the script without even a line of code in the class. He also briefly mentions the PHP 5.3 adoption levels and notes that several larger projects will be 5.3-only soon and will start to force the hand of developers and hosting companies.

Stuart Herbert has been studying adoption rates for Windows use on PHP and, in response to comments made in this article he's shares some of his own stats on Windows adoption (at least in the European market).

[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.

Stuart Herbert has an informal post asking for feedback on how many developers/organizations out there have already adopted this latest version of PHP.

Now that PHP 5.3 has been around for a few months and we've started seeing plenty of blog posts covering all the new features in PHP 5.3, I'm wondering whether or not you have actually moved to PHP 5.3 yet.

To cast your vote, head over to this poll and choose one of the options (or Other). As of the time of this post, it looks like the "No, my $distro doesn't support it yet" option is barely in the lead in front of "Yes...and I'm loving it!". There's lots of reasons in the "Other" category as well. Get your vote in before September 21st when the poll closes.

On the php|architect blog there's a new post from Cal Evans (of Ibuildings) with what he thinks is one of the largest reasons that frameworks aren't as well-adopted as they should be - arrogance.

Developers are notoriously self-confident in their ability to write code that is better, faster, cleaner and better-smelling than everybody else's. In today's environment, however, the focus is on producing immediately useful code'"and, given the richness of today's frameworks, those who eschew them in favour of home-grown solutions are forever running the risk of reinventing the wheel for no good reason. We have enough wheels'"start building some cars.

He suggests that, with all of the "reinventing the wheel" that's been going on and overpowering frameworks that are out there, that developers need to take a step back and find a framework that fits for them. Coding from scratch (usually) isn't a good option - there's almost always a framework or application based on one out there that'll fit with just what you need.

Pick a framework that has a thriving community and then spend the time to learn it. Quit re-inventing the wheel, start using the wheel to solve your client's problems. Get out there and build them a car.

Damien Seguy has posted the PHP statistics for this month - the results from February 2008 - here's some of the highlights:

• PHP 5 set record of growth : + 2,5%, up to 32%
• PHP 5.2 is the second most popular version, ahead of 4.3.
• PHP 4.4.8's popularity is falling

You can check out the numbers yourself for the month as well as the evolution stats showing how things are progressing. He's also added a new graph this month showing the adoption rate that PHP5 is having in the online world.

Ivo Jansch points out a recent interview he was asked to do in the Computerworld UK magazine about the recent launch of the Ibuildings company there in the UK.

I was recently interviewed by Computerworld UK regarding our launch in the UK and the current rise of PHP in the corporate world. The result is online here.

He also asks readers how they see PHP adoption going in their companies: "Post a comment to let me know how 'PHP' and 'Business' go together in your region."

In a new post to his blog, Sandro Groganz asks the questions "does PHP 5 hurt PHP?"

The thing that I keep wondering is if we aren't seeing a slowdown in general PHP adoption due to other technologies being able to get a leg up while PHP 5 was in development and the succeeding slow migration from PHP 4 to 5.

Sandro suggests that, because of the release of PHP5, the creation (and modifications) of PHP applications has slowed, causing the imbalance between applications that are PHP 5 ready.

Jacob Santos makes some of his own comments about the recent PHP5 adoption talk that's been going around in the PHP community (spurred on by comments made by Matt of the Wordpress project).

Matt brings up some good points. What might be limiting PHP 5 adoption, could just be the lack of interest in developers. [...] Up until reading his rant, I've lived in a box where everyone I've talked to, used and enjoyed PHP 5 and its vast extensions. Developing in PHP 5.0 was uneventfully, but you learn to appreciate PHP 5 with the core inclusion of PDO with PHP 5.1. PHP 5 is not without annoyances. In the core developers attempts to "better" the language, they made changes that broke code that previously worked.

He looks at a few of the items for debate surrounding the move from PHP4 to PHP5 including the extensions that come bundled with PHP5, solving the register_globals issue, and a brief mention of the Standard PHP Library.