According to Netcraft Web Server Survey in December, the Webs most dramatic change last year was the 52 percent growth in Web servers hosting a dynamic server-side scripting language—a much faster growth rate than the Web overall.
Almost one-quarter of all Web servers now have a scripting language of some kind installed. Microsofts Active Server Pages and The PHP Groups PHP are the top two choices. (By the way, PHP 4.3 was released Dec. 27, adding a new streams API.)
However, the fastest gainer among scripting languages was neither of these but Suns JSP (JavaServer Pages). “The number of IP addresses using JSP on their front page roughly trebled last year, albeit from a small base of a little over 10,000 IP addresses this time last year,” the Netcraft report states.
“Most of the well-known Unix-based application servers … make use of JSP, and, having failed to achieve critical mass as a general-purpose scripting language, JSP has found a worthwhile niche at the top end of the market in tandem with the application servers,” the report says.
The December Netcraft survey can be downloaded at www.netcraft.com/survey.