On PHPBuilder.com today there's this new tutorial for those out there at the most basic level of PHP development looking to get up to speed on what PHP is and what makes it one of the most popular web scripting languages out there.

PHP (or Personal HomePage Tools) was created by Rasmus Lerdorf over three years ago to track visitors to his homepage. PHP has since evolved into a powerful server-side markup language with syntax that resembles a mix between Perl and C.

They cover all of the key questions - what is PHP, why use it and a simple explanation of a basic script (outputting the date) as well as links to other external resources where you can get more information.

Josh Sharp has posted a new article to his blog advocating something that there's still a lot of controversy around in the PHP community - frameworks (when to use them and when to not).

PHP's ease of use is also its downfall. Because there are less restrictions on the structure of the code you write, it's much easier to write bad code. But there is a solution: use a framework. [...] Of course, if you're not taken with any of the packages above you can also write your own framework, which I've done and will talk about in the next few posts. But for now, let's have a look at the common benefits of a framework.

He's broken it out to talk about the usual framework structure, MVC and how a framework can enforce good code standards. He also mentions some happy side benefits of their use including making for "pretty URLs" and the helpers that most of the frameworks come with.

Krystian Hoffman has posted to his blog today a few reasons (10 to be exact) that he likes and uses PHP. Fortunately, most of them are some of the best reasons for anyone to use the language.

ended up with ten points on why I use PHP and I guess this would be a good post here on my blog, as it seems people like lists in general and maybe I could get some people out there that aren't really sure about whether PHP is good or bad, to get some insight at least.

Here's some of his list:

• The PHP Community
• The (language's) Performance
• Its Portability
• It has strong Object-oriented support

Other things got a mention as well - the low learning curve, low cost, included libraries - but the above few seemed the strongest.

Stefan Mischook has posted another take on why he thinks PHP developers should learn object-oriented programming:

For people new to OOP and are comfortable with 'classic' procedural php, you may be wondering why should you even bother to learn object oriented concepts...why go through the trouble?

He has several suggestions included in the post like:

• PHP is moving in an OOP direction [...] So, to really understand and use these frameworks properly, you need to understand object oriented PHP.
• Object oriented PHP really begins to shine as the project becomes more complex, and when you have more than one person doing the programming.
• OOP is the modern way of software development and all the major languages [...] it only makes sense (in terms of career,) to keep your skills up-to-date.
• OOP based PHP is much easier to maintain and update

He also suggests a method for developers to get started with OOP in PHP - how to plan out a project and think in objects rather than procedurally.

On the Stubbles blog, there's a new post that answers a question they'd mentioned in a previous post about why they develop the Stubbles framework.

In an earlier entry I promised that we will explain why we develop Stubbles. Well, there is a short version of it and a long version.

Short version: for us.
Read on for the long version.

He (Franke Kleine) lists out the reasons in his long version, including:

• Release cycles and maintenance requirements
• Why "use your force to improve another framework" is not a valid point
• Do we really reinvent the wheel?
• More company influence
• To open source or to not open source

...each with their own justification. Even if some of them are a little weak ("other people started frameworks, why can't we?"), most are good reasons for them to create their own in-house framework that just happens to be released to the rest of the community. Their effort wasn't to create something for the greater good, but to make something that they (and anyone else that might find it useful) could use.

Courtesy of an update to this post on the Zend Develoer Zone site, there's a bit more detail from Hannes Magnusson, himself (the developer behind the recent changes to the PHP.net website) in a new blog post on his site.

As many of you know I changed the frontpage of php.net recently by moving conference announcements and call for papers to its own dedicated page in a desperate attempt to regain the control of our frontpage.

The rest of the post discusses the points of "why?", "regain control?", "what gave you the right?" and even links to a patch that puts a "conference teaser" back on the page (near the top).

On the Zend Developer Zone today, Cal Evans looks back some more at his experiences at this year's OSCON and mentions his personal favorite session attended while there - the PHP Lightning talks.

The absolute best session I attended at OSCON 2006 was the "PHP Lightening Talks". Some of the presentations were interesting, others were hilarious. Theo Schlossnagle's Why PHP Sucks was both. Theo is a facilitating to sit and listen to, as you'll soon see when I post my interview with him. He's also quite funny when he wants to be. His presentation was interesting. It was part tongue-in-cheek and part dead serious but Theo left it to you to decide which was which.

He also points out another post about the talk from Chris Shiflett where a rather large discussion started about the contents of Theo's slides. And Cal hits the nail on the head:

The talk was good, don't get me wrong, but the conversation it inspired is much more interesting.

On the PowerHomeBix.com site today, there's this new article from Comdev Software asking "Why PHP in the web applications?"

With the growing demand of PHP in the web applications, PHP modules have been introduced to cater for web design and web development needs in order to shorten the development process and eliminate writing PHP codes from scratch.

The article talks about the huge growth lately in the number of frameworks and "ready-made modules" that has happened lately. It mentions that these are growing because PHP's growing (and PHP's growing because...well, you get the idea). These modules can play an important part in an application and can cut down development time greatly - always good from a business standpoint.

On her blog today, Ligaya Turmelle brings up some comments made previously by Rasmus himself to answer the question "why use PHP5?" and encourage adoption of this powerful version.

Noticed an interesting thread on the PHP-general mailing list. The original thread was someone asking why should the world start adopting PHP5. Rasmus came back and answered the question with a list of benefits of making the change (using 5.1 not 5.0). Now I admit to not working with any of these, but many of them certainly look interesting enough for a second glance.

The items listed include:

• SimpleXML
• Improved DOM support
• the inclusion of xmlreader/xmlwriter
• SOAP functionality
• a native date/time mechanism

The PHP5 adoption rate is slowly on the rise as more and more development is done on it, but it's still surprising to me how much of the world is still back in PHP4-only land.

On WebProNews.com a PHP roadmap has been posted - a comprehensive look at what PHP is and how it's evolved.

We expect our readers to have a more than firm handle on what PHP is, but for completeness-sake: PHP (a recursive acronym of PHP: Hypertext Pre-processor) is an open source, server-side web-scripting language for creating dynamic pages.

They look first at what PHP has to offer, then how it's evolved, and finally a comparison of PHP to several other langauges, including Perl, Java, and Cold Fusion.