A few years ago I worked on a very big Enterprise IBM Websphere project. We had some brilliant engineers in the project both in the development and architecture groups. I remember having had several discussions with some of the brightest people on the team regarding PHP and dynamic languages and generally they were looked upon as toy languages without a bright future. Lack of strict typing, scripting performance, and other reasons were given for why Java would persevere as the language of choice.
This was the typical reaction dynamic languages would get from the Java community. There were many believable reasons for why these languages, especially the ones gaining fame on top of the LAMP stack, would not last. However, one thing which the Java community ignored for many years was the radical shift to the Web, not only for media and e-commerce Web sites but for a large majority of business applications including CRM, ERP, reporting, document management, etc… As a result Java EE (then called J2EE) was not built with the Web in mind but rather focused on enterprise integration, transaction management and other back-end processing. While Java EE has long supported Web development with servlets and JSP the companies driving the standards ignored the RESTful nature of the Web and rather continued to drive a general purpose platform.
In parallel, the LAMP-like architecture built on top of the C language’s eco-system of libraries and tools started becoming the most popular platform for developing Web applications. This trend grew in the second half of the 90s and with a recession following the burst of the .com bubble it greatly accelerated due to the lower TCO that the LAMP solutions had to offer. While there are a variety of dynamic languages which make up the LAMP development and deployment paradigm, the most ubiquitous language has been PHP. As a result of PHP being domain specific to the Web it has been shaped in a way which makes it fit the Web paradigm like a glove. By focusing on solving the common Web patterns quickly and easily it holds the biggest market share on the Web. In two separate surveys of one of the most popular Ajax Web sites, the Ajaxian.com, around 50% of Rich Internet Applications developers are using PHP. The trend has also been significantly accelerated as a result of the many popular PHP packages including Wordpress, Drupal, mediaWiki, osCommerce, SugarCRM, and more…
When it became apparent to the large Java vendors that the Web paradigm was being built and innovated without Java they started backing a variety of both standards and non-standards driven Java Web application frameworks which promised to adapt Java to the Web. Such frameworks included Java Server Faces, Struts, Spring MVC and others. Some of these frameworks have been more successful than others but in general none of them managed to resolve one of Java’s main pain points on the Web. The strict typing and overly complex architecture of Java applications meant longer development times and a need for more skilled engineers in order to push Java applications into the market, i.e. Java’s TCO on the Web was unsatisfactory.
In the meanwhile the large Java vendors were trying to hold the stick at both ends. On one hand trying to be part of the Web paradigm shift and on the other hand protecting their multi-billion dollar businesses built on the Java language. Even the pervasiveness of dynamic languages in the Web space didn’t change the vendor’s behavior significantly. The big change came when Microsoft aggressively pursued a multi-language runtime environment for the .NET platform. Not only did they support C# and VB on their virtual machine but they worked with their developer community to add a large amount of languages including Cobol, Eiffel, Ruby, Python, and others. As dynamic languages continued to grow to the point where industry analysts started defining categories (e.g. Forrester Research on dynamic languages) Microsoft continued to leverage their common runtime which was designed from the get go to support multiple languages.
As mentioned earlier the de-facto standard implementations of the successful dynamic languages including PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby are all written in C and leverage the breadth and depth of the eco-system of C libraries. As community driven projects these languages do not have a specification nor is their development hindered by corporate bureaucracy. On the contrary, these languages are being developed by their users who have only one end goal – get the job done, quickly… As a result the languages are constantly evolving often adding significant enhancements in minor releases. With the rapid changes in how modern Web applications are being built and deployed this agile
Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 8063 bytes)
