Why PHP?

We’re users and lovers of PHP. We’re unabashed about it, but it’s based on some serious business logic and customer feedback, not just geeky emotion.

It’s not just our opinion, first off. The popularity of the PHP scripting language and development community has been well-documented. Evans Data estimates there are somewhere around 5 million PHP programmers in the world--about 10 times the number of programmers using traditional iSeries tools--compared to about 6.4 million .NET programmers and 5.8 million Java programmers. Moreover, the number of PHP programmers is growing faster than the other two languages.

PHP is, incidentally, open source. For Lumenation and building your own custom apps in our environment, that means there’s no vendor lock-in. PHP is portable and runs on Linux, Windows, i5, OS X, Free BSD, Solaris… and probably any other OS you’re working with. Build your app here, take it somewhere else later. Not a problem. Think you’re going to hear that from Salesforce.com?

PHP is also simple. It’s popular at least partially because you don’t have to be a hard-core programmer. Many web developers use and love PHP. There are an estimated 23 - 25 million Internet domains using PHP, or a bit less than one-third of the Web's total. I hate it when someone uses the backwards logic that something is good cause it’s popular, but, in this case, that’s a lot of people freely choosing it over other options.

It’s really fast, and when utilized with the Lumenation Z-Windows AJAX Engine, it scales big time… What’s not to like?

So, next time someone invites you to try their development environment, pay attention to the language they’re hawking. PHP might be the right language for you and your custom app.