In a new post to his blog today Cal Evans looks at PHP, the community and how user groups fit into the mix. He shares opinions from the community and a video taken of a roundtable at this year's TEKX.

Those that know me know that the PHP community is near and dear to my heart. I am always looking for ways to support it, usually to the chagrin of my employer. We have the greatest community of any programming language I know of and I like helping people find ways to participate in it.

The video is a roundtable featuring Raphael Dohms, Lorna Mitchell, Michelangelo Van Dam and Ben Ramsey talking about some of what they've seen as experienced group leaders. Cal also includes suggestions from other community members about what has worked in their user group (to help others out there either just getting off the ground or wanting to grow their group).

Recently CIO Magazine had a roundtable interview with representatives from each of the major language players on the web today - Javascript, Ruby, Perl, Python, Tcl and, of course, PHP.

Three years ago, Lynn Greiner interviewed the big cheeses responsible for the popular scripting languages PHP, Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby and JavaScript to find out where the languages were headed. In this follow-up discussion, she asks the dynamic language luminaries what has changed since then.

Representatives from (previously) Netscape, the Perl Foundation, the Python Software Foundation and the IronRuby team were all included. Topics asked about include the differing needs for different languages, trends on adoption and why some of these shifts are happening.

The details are a bit scarce, but the Dallas PHP User Group has posted this new entry with information about their upcoming meeting.

The group will be gathering at 7pm on May the 9th in their usual location, the UTD School of Management in Richardson, Texas. The topic for this month's meeting is just a roundtable discussion of whatever topics come up, a free time to ask questions and get answers.

You can get complete details on the location (including a map) and information on the group from their site.