davej Posted October 8, 2011 Share Posted October 8, 2011 I have noticed that in the online communities PHP seems to be extremely popular. For example amongst the W3 forums the PHP forum has by far the most postings. Far more postings than even HTML or CSS. Why is this? Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ingolme Posted October 8, 2011 Share Posted October 8, 2011 Because PHP is the only free server-side language, or at least the most widely-known one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
boen_robot Posted October 9, 2011 Share Posted October 9, 2011 Well, technically, most server side languages are free, or at least have free implementations. Even ASP.NET has a free implementation in the face of "MONO". But yes, PHP is the most widely used server side language.This popularity is mostly due to the fact PHP is easy to get started with, thanks to the fact it can be embedded in HTML and has a lot of out of the box functionality optimized for web pages. Earlier server side languages used to require developers to write full scripts that had to output the HTML you want and web specific functionality was often with external libraries. You might say HTML was embedded into the language, rather than the language being embedded into HTML.Later languages have learned that lesson, but PHP still has the inertia. Plus, now that there are many PHP developers, there's a "bandwagon effect" - people start with PHP because there are PHP developers to assist them if they have problems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fmdpa Posted October 11, 2011 Share Posted October 11, 2011 Because PHP is the only free server-side language, or at least the most widely-known one. Ruby on Rails is completely free and has a large open-source development community behind it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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