I like PHP, I really do. PHP5 is a great language and was a huge step in the right direction, unfortunately the community doesn’t agree. It is not that the PHP community thinks PHP5 is bad, it is just that they don’t agree on anything really. I am starting to wonder if the lack of cohesion is going to bring real trouble to success of PHP as a language.
I no longer write much PHP since I spend most of my time working with Ruby on Rails, but I do have a vested interest in PHP remaining a successful platform for serious development since it has a prominent role on my resume. Unfortunately the PHP community seems to lack the focus and agreement necessary to progress much further.
The lack of a successful framework for PHP is a serious problem. It sounds like Cake could end up being the crowd favorite, but I imagine that would be hard to do with Zend making so much noise about their own offering. The Zend Framework seems doomed to me at this point. It is a bad sign that people are leaving the development team before it gets completed. To me that is an indication that there isn’t much real excitement going on and that the team lacks the ‘one vision / one mind’ needed to pull off such a project. There also seems to be some really odd decisions made about the order of development of the Zend Framework (RSS syndication was more important than authentication?).
In 2003 the Zend IDE was a huge boost to developer productivity, PEAR was gaining traction, PHP5 was on the horizon and it was going to fix the object oriented features and add namespaces, and additional features were being directed towards PECL to reduce bloat; PHP was poised to take over. Then there was a big debate about exceptions vs. PEAR::Error and everything seems to start unravelling. Namespaces were taken out. Bickering flared up on the PEAR and php-internals mailing lists. PHP5 kept being delayed. Zend started offering certification for developers but ignored PHP5. The luster was tarnished and the community hasn’t recovered.
I hope I am wrong, but it looks like it is not going to improve anytime soon.
