Just Tom's Musings Thoughts on art, programming, and whatever else.

Just how popular is PHP?

Getting ready to start a new quarter at the Art Institute, and teaching an introductory course on PHP (www.php.net).  It got me thinking… just how popular and widely used is PHP?  And, is that looking to change?  Is there something else on the horizon that might threaten to topple PHP’s place as (probably) the most popular of all the web development languages?

According to Builtwith.com – PHP leads the pack ahead of ASP.net, Java and other technologies.  You can see some interesting pie graphs here:

http://trends.builtwith.com/framework/PHP

I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t even realize Facebook is built using PHP (sheesh, and I call myself an expert).  I stumbled on this fact sheet page while looking around today:

Facebook is the second most-trafficked PHP site in the world, and one of the largest MySQL installations anywhere, running thousands of databases. Facebook has built a lightweight but powerful multi-language RPC framework that allows the company to seamlessly…
http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?factsheet

Uh, the second most trafficked PHP site?  There’s only 3 sites ahead of Facebook in website traffic overall (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo), so which of those is built with PHP?  Microsoft!  Just kidding.. it’s Yahoo.   In 2002, Yahoo rebuilt their sites to run on PHP.

http://wheel.troxo.com/2008/01/08/most-popular-websites-running-on-php/

Flickr, Wikipedia, Digg and others are on the list.  But that’s a bit of an old list, and it doesn’t include some interesting new developments with my favorite PHP framework – Drupal.

Drupal’s gaining traction pretty well, note the following sites that have recently made the jump to this PHP driven and open-source CMS  (Content Management System):   The Whitehouse, Lucas Arts, Slate, BBC, CNN, Reuters, Duke University, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Symentec, Nokia, Sony Erickson and a whole bunch more…  http://drupal.org/node/671566

Not to mention the bazillion blogs / sites  built with Wordpress – which in turn is built with PHP.   So all-in-all, I would say PHP is still doing pretty darn well.  Which just goes to show that it’s hard to beat the open-source train once it starts to gain momentum.