Re: PHP on .NET DLR

PHP has historically never chased fads.  We wait and see which platforms
win, and we end up on those simply because we need PHP on those
platforms.  When/if Silverlight becomes a viable platform for real
large-scale deployment, PHP will be on it.  Many PHP sites are small,
but most strive to be the next Yahoo/Facebook/Technorati/Vonage etc. and
at this point I see no sign of any of these major players doing anything
at all with Silverlight.  M$ has a major hurdle on their hands.  I'm not
particularly anti-M$, and I hope they do somehow come up with a way to
make it easy to deploy, manage and monitor in a cost-effective way a
colo full of machines that can run a Silverlight application that takes
a billion hits a day.

Most contributors to the PHP project work on realworld applications.  We
are a very pragmatic bunch.  We build what we need.  We don't build what
we think people might need in 3 years if the stars align correctly.
This approach has worked extremely well for 12 years now.  Right now
nobody working on PHP needs Silverlight, nor has there been a
significant level of interest in it from PHP users.  Perhaps we all have
our heads in the sand and Silverlight will stomp all over everything
else.  Frankly I am seeing more interest in Adobe Air from where I sit
here in Silicon Valley working for the highest-trafficed web site in the
world.  Yet we still deploy more freebsd/linux servers with Apache and
PHP than anything else and that won't change for years to come.

-Rasmus

K T Ligesh wrote:
>  Hi,
> 
>   So that's it? 'Nobody cares' (tm)? 'You can switch to Ruby if you want to, and nobody's stopping you'? Or am I on the wrong list?
> 
>   Does the PHP community have any interest in PHP on DLR? IronRuby is going to be hosted on RubyForge, so it is going to be a community effort ultimately, and that's one of the things that attracted MS. In contrast, the PHP community is SO hostile to DLR that they are ignoring a fully finished implementation--phalanger?
> 
>  To be frank, with Silverlight, I don't think anyone has a choice now. The hype is too much, and the number of hits that ironRuby gives on Google is staggering, especially considering its nascent pre-alpha state. So PHP will be one of those things that didn't adapt to the changes and then loses the war.
> 
>  There's lot to be learned from history--VHS vs betamax or Redhat vs Caldera. Mindshare is the key. You lose that, and then there wont' be anything for anyone to monetize.
> 
>  Thanks for listening.
> 
>