According to this new post on the Web Builder Zone, the results of a poll taken about the best programming method for PHP these days is - by far - object-oriented programming.

After two weeks of gathering votes, the PHP paradigms poll is now closed. With 216 votes (73%), the winner paradigm in popularity is Object-Oriented Programming. The old procedural approach to PHP, which has given fame to Wordpress and Drupal, is coming to an end. Even Drupal 7 has an object-oriented database layer as a primary component, and this paradigm is by far the most diffused in the world for web sites and applications written in high level languages (different from C).

While the overwhelming amount of votes went to OOP, there were still a few for some of the other options including the second place winner - procedural programming. He also talks a bit about OOP's current place in the PHP ecosystem and how it has allowed for certain great tools to be developed, but how it also has a good ways to go in functionality.

On the Web Builder Zone there's a new article posted from Giorgio Sironi asking readers what they think is the next direction web applications will head towards.

PHP is one of the most used web development programming languages in the world, and from its original creation in 1995 has evolved much both as a platform, with drivers for nearly every existent database, and as a language itself, with the introduction of several new programming paradigms.

He gives an overview of the history of the PHP language and how, at each turn, the improvements lead to more robust use of these features. He mentions three major advancements these updates have allowed developers to make - first procedural code, then object-oriented advancements and finally, with the release of the PHP 5.3 series, functional programming.

Finally, he asks the reader for a little feedback on what will become the next big thing for the PHP language in the coming years

Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words - check out the one included with this new post on Ed Finkler's blog today, a graph of the NIST NVD data showing where most of the security-related PHP issues lie.

PHP Applications by themselves account for over 40% of all NIST NVD entries in 2006. We need more than new frameworks. We need new paradigms for PHP development.

These new paradigms of PHP development have been a long time coming (it's all been jokes about it thus far), but there's already forces at work to help make things simpler and better for those developing applications. Frameworks, while not new in themselves, are making writing applications easier than ever before when using their built-in tools.