Java, subject of one of computing's biggest hype-fests, is now in decline. "Reports by Evans Data Corp., which does annual surveys of the activities of software developers, show Java use is slipping as LAMP and Microsoft's .NET technology gain traction. In North America, the percentage of developers who use Java as one of their principal programming languages declined to 47.9% in Evans' fall survey, vs. 51.4% in the fall of 2002. The same surveys show that while Java use is climbing in Asia, it's on the decline in Europe," reports Business Week.
As usual, LAMP is an acronym for Linux, Apache, MySQL and "a collection of so-called scripting languages that all start with the letter P -- Perl, Python, and PHP" -- but in this case, mainly for PHP.
Browser pioneer Marc Andreessen, chairman of Zend, a PHP company, says the shift is like the one in the 1990s from traditional programming languages C and C+ to Java. "We're seeing it now with a big migration from Java to PHP in Web development," he says. Stats back him up. The number of Web sites using PHP has risen to 23 million today from zero in 2000, according to surveys by the Internet analysis firm Netcraft.
Comment: It's amusing to see Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen popping up again, because during the Java bubble, he was involved with the high-profile Javagator development. This was, as you'd guess, Netscape Navigator rewritten in Java. It never appeared. Andreessen said it was a disaster.
