Several months back, there was somewhat of an uproar in the Ruby and Ruby on Rails communities when it was revealed that after two years of effort, the CD Baby Web site was abandoning their Ruby on Rails rewrite. The CD Baby site was reimplemented in mere months after returning to the use of PHP. This past week, I have been working with another company that is in a very similar situation.
Users of of dynamic languages such as Python, Perl and PHP, are often faced with the additional task of ensuring that type-related errors do not occur in their programs at runtime. Some authors [1, 2] claim that this can be done effectively by the use of extensive automated unit tests. However, practice has shown this to just not be the case.
A few days back a colleague forwarded me a link to an article entitled Attacking PHP. It goes through a list of the problems associated with PHP. And based on my past experiences dealing with PHP in corporate environments, the analysis in that article is spot on.
In short, PHP is just not a suitable language for serious Web application development. I’ve seen it used for a wide variety of Web apps at numerous companies, but the results have always been negative.