Netcraft.com has posted the results of a web server survey with data compiled starting in 2002 all the way up to 2012 about the growth and usage of PHP on the web. The title of the article, "PHP just grows & grows", gives a clue to their findings.

Netcraft began its Web Server Survey in 1995 and has tracked the deployment of a wide range of scripting technologies across the web since 2001. One such technology is PHP, which Netcraft presently finds on well over 200 million websites.

For those not familiar with the language, they give an overview of its history starting back with PHP v1 that Rasmus Lerdorf developed for his own uses. They move quickly through the years talking about versions and improvements made during their lifecycle. They also talk some about their own tracking methods and the metrics they use to measure PHP's growth - hostnames serving up PHP-based sites, removal of active (not spam) sites, unique IPs and actual computers/machines.

On the PHPBuilder.com site Anthony Corbelli has a new tutorial looking at the differences between using GET and POST in the context of an Ajax-enabled application.

GET is typically used when you simply need to retrieve data and POST is used when you want to change the state of the server (i.e. send/update data on the server). This article will discuss how we use GET and POST methodology in our Ajax applications!

Complete code for his examples is included - both the Javascript and PHP sides. His example handles both GET and POST requests the same way, returning the city and zip information.

The latest version of the Solar framework has been released, according to this new post on Paul Jones' blog today. Version 0.18.0 has several updates, but most importantly, there's an update to the testing methodolgy.

He also provides some examples with the inclusion of code from the Solar_Test class, a test written for Solar_Uri, the Solar_Test_Suite class, and a command-line test-runner (as well as a few others).