[gregjor]

I don't think PHP and Java really compete for mindshare. Java has mainly thrived for larger enterprise projects, whereas PHP appealed to individual developers and smaller businesses, and applications like WordPress. Of course there's overlap and companies may use both, but writing a web application in Java requires significantly more investment than choosing PHP.

Eclipse supported PHP from 2007, and the PHPStorm IDE from JetBrains dates to 2010 or 2011. Java has always had better tooling because of the enterprise focus. PHP IDEs are very good today.

PHP 7.x and 8.x have seen big performance improvements. I haven't seen hack/hhvm get much traction outside of Facebook but maybe it did.