“The entrenchment of commercial Web application languages–most
notably Microsoft’s ASP (now ASP .Net), Sun’s JSP, and Macromedia’s
ColdFusion–seems to leave little room for open source
alternatives. Yet one open source Web scripting language has truly
hit the big time: PHP, a fashionably recursive acronym for
Hypertext Preprocessor.“Of the roughly 10 million sites running on the Apache Web
server, nearly half are running PHP, according to
SecuritySpace.com, a consulting group that gathers statistics on
Internet online services. More surprising, U.K.-based Internet
research and analysis company Netcraft reported last August that
the use of PHP on Windows Web servers is skyrocketing and is on
course to overtake Macromedia’s ColdFusion…”