A Brief Comparison of Server-side Scripting Langauges

PHP is easily learnt online so there are a few resources online that may be helpful with a Google search. Moreover, the PHP.net's documentation is probably the first place to get if you're stuck on something. Their documentation is one of a kind.

Wow! Kind of surprised by this! Pretty sure a lot of web programming still done in perl. You may want to take a few steps back and look at this list:

http://www.masonhq.com/?MasonPoweredSites

Notice "Amazon.com" there under "A" on the first screenful. I haven't bothered to read all of them myself.

I just started using "Mason", but AFAICT perl has been used embedded in html a la PHP & the rest of this list for a long time:

<% my %hash %>

There's also a framework (Catalyst) which predates RonR and Python's Django...

After working with the Java Seam framework and the likes of JSF and RichFaces I am inclined to say that Java now has my corner on fancy interface development Another tool in the box thank you very much

RD, I'm looking to pick up a new web application skill set over the next few months; would you recommend ASP.NET MVC or Java EE/Spring/JBoss, etc. (or something else?)

Java EE 5 + Seam, love them

I've got some experience with Spring/Hibernate/JBoss. They're fun to learn, too. Definitely flexible.

Well, just so no one gets discouraged here, there are a couple of obvious reasons for that popularity:

1) those languages are easier to learn
2) perl is much more *nix based, hence MS users don't use it. Most servers are unix or linux servers; but most people who code at home use Windows. A lot of the "general scripting" that goes on on a server will be in perl, so in that sense it's probably "the most popular" scripting language on a server box.
3) mod_perl is something you have to ask for, hosts don't give it to you by default. Perl is a bit of a pig, memory wise, but very "fast", eg, lite on the processor, which that is causal relationship.

So it is not as if it is less "popular" because it is "not as useful", etc, since perl is almost certainly a much more "powerful" language than (eg) php. Which is the reason that it is much used for general scripting, etc. And php and ruby were both derived from perl.

Also, please don't forget that at least 75%+ (okay I'm guessing) of contemporary cgi is still done in perl. Which CGI is pretty much the original "server side scripting".

hats off to spork on the initial article. On the topic of PHP can I say online resources are great, however I think a book somehow feels like it is written by an author, author(ity). I have to shout out about Larry Ullman in particular on PHP and also Steven Holzner on PHP as learning resources - if you decide to go with PHP as your native web site scripting language.