Decaflon

Correct - PHP isn't talked about much. Ruby (base) isn't really spoken of beyond being in combination with Rails either.

CakePHP + Symfony for php, DJANGO for python etc is what's being mentioned. It's the frameworks that are taking over ;)

I think it's out these days.

It's either Ruby or PhP for most small web apps and then .NET for midsize to enterpise level, then Java for enterprise only.

At least that's what it seems like these days.

PHP, not talked about? Where do you get that impression from?

Here are some numbers from Sitepoint latest survey (06):

- over 2/3 of respondents use PHP for (some of) their web development!
- 8.15% use coldfusion (so not dead yet).
- And let's not forget perl either (at 9.79%, ever heard of del.icio.us?)

And, of course, let's not forget about my favorite: ruby/rails, up to 5.31% :)

The full report is at http://www.sitepoint.com/report2006/state_of_web_development_results.pdf

One more interesting tidbit from that study, which is more telling. The graph on the next page, about the platform people are not using now, but plan on using in the next 12 months:

Ruby: an additional 24% (on top of the 5%), and that's #2
PHP: +15%
cold fusion: +7% (that's more than java/jsp BTW).

Coldfusion is still a great dev environment. It costs money for the server, and Ruby on Rails is very hot right now. But we still build a lot of sites in CF and get great results.

Don't confuse a programming language or environment not being talked about to not being used. You don't see many cutting edge Perl blogs out there but it's still the glue used to bind a whole lot of the internet together. Maybe nobody is talking about PHP because they're all busy making a lot of money using it to write web applications. Compare this to all the RoR bloggers fellating each other over who can make the nicer to-do list application :)

*Ready for da hate*

No hate - it's the same for ColdFusion.

These are great platforms. They're quiet because they WORK. See, that's why .NET gets so much coverage...

*Ready for more hate...

Hehe, you guys are funny.

At Gustavus, we used to use ColdFusion for everything but have been slowly migrating everything to brand new PHP stuff. We have a lot of existing code, and instead of just porting everything, we are rethinking the way we do everything so it is quite time-consuming.

I haven't written much ColdFusion code in the past year and I couldn't be happier. CF was pretty good for a while, but for us it doesn't even compare to the flexibility and power that PHP offers us. Whenever a bug creeps up in an old CF app, I cringe just thinking about going in there and tinkering around. A lot of that has to do with it being an older code base, but I simply find the syntax a little clunky.

So, for me at least, ColdFusion is out.

ColdFusion is still in, but its a pretty small and quiet circle compared to other technologies.