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It's arguable that PHP has already disrupted webapps (though I'm not sure what went before - ie. what was disrupted - because PHP was a fairly early tech), in that so many companies use it, including those big successful ones mentioned (facebook, youtube etc even CD Baby). It could even be on the decline these days, if people start to outgrow it as they acquire more skill, and there is no supply of additional low skilled adopters to fuel its growth. If so, the only option for PHP is to move upmarket. The next step seems to be to disrupt Java enterprise webapps. Although that may not be exciting to a mainstream programmer, it would still be a disruption, and typical of how disruptions move upmarket, tier by tier. fmw and bad_user have noted many important aspects of PHP, but I was really just thinking of its core idea: templates. PHP didn't originate them (eg bash does it echo hello $name; C has printf; etc), but it's taken it to the logical extreme of a program being a template, and it's the most popular embodiment (I think coldfusion and others did it too, but less successfully). I think templates are a great idea, because they are simple and concrete. Abstraction and other meta features are powerful; but if the job doesn't need them, they only obscure what you are trying to do. While surprisingly versatile (e.g. TXL does language translation with them), templates are limited as a general programming concept - and so PHP is probably similarly limited, perhaps to just the web (maybe it could expand to desktop applications, since they increasing use HTML for UIs - though deskapps are seemly being disrupted themselves by webapps). But it's hard to seriously entertain a fps in PHP; a compiler (though consider TXL...); a VM; a RDB; mathematica; pagerank implementation; numerical simulation; an OS. Meanwhile, the template "technology" is accessible from other languages: python, ruby, java etc all have a broad choice of templating engines for webpage generation. So it is arguable that the technology of templating has been co-opted by the mainstream - although, PHP remains the simplest one. When the job is simplest enough, it seems PHP will win, simply because it can do the job, and it is accessible to more people. BTW: the factors others have mentioned are also important (low cost hosting, labour etc) - though some of them can be traced to the simplicity and concreteness of templates (which made webapp creation possible for people with less skill). I have to admit, I am a huge fan of template "technology". I think it is a brilliantly insightful and simplifying idea. They can also be seen as productions in a CFG. |