About five years back I looked at PHP salaries and they were no where near Java salaries. In many cases the few enterprises that were hiring were wanting to pay PHP developers half as much as Java developers. Now I have seen some PHP salaries around and even above the six figure mark while Java salaries are still range a little higher. I was just contacted about a job and they asked about PHP and Java and I was surprised that they were looking to convert from Java to PHP on their web apps. At the same time I was also contact about converting a e-commerce site from PHP to Java so while PHP may gain in one B2B project it may lose some in the B2C market. It seems like PHP has caught up to or is catching up to Java in respect and pay. Neither one is my preference but it's good to see some biases going away.
I wouldnt have said that PHP has caught up yet... for one Java can be used online and offline where as PHP is naturally limited to online only. Application developers are traditionally paid more than web developers but this is also changing. This would need to change and for PHP to be accepted at bluechip level enterprises for salaries to really become equal - to be honest I am not convinced it will happen. I was surprised to find out that a 2 recent large clients both actually were running .Net despite the fact that one has PHP and the other CFM file extensions so would appear that JSP/ .Net (and CFM to a lesser degree) are still the choice for the majority including those that started out on PHP
Not sure, I think a lot of PHP programmers are more free lancers than actual corporate. java isn't really the greatest web language though
JSP etc is fairly common in established blue chip company websites and certainly not client side. The problem is that it is fairly limited to large organisations with the joys of mainframes to connect to etc and therefore is fairly unknown by many hobbiests even though TomCat is free and a perfectly good environment to run small sites in
Some are seeing the value of the web specific, rapid application development languages like PHP and CFML. I worked at one company that was CFML and went to Java (JBoss, Spring, Hibernate, ANT, JASSO, and about ten other things) and found that it wasn't nearly as productive. I left and soon after they let all of the Java developers go and kept the CF developers. It's not uncommon to see CF or PHP front ends with .NET or Java backends.
No, in these two cases it wasnt a split between front and back ends but that the .php extension had been remapped to run through the .Net engine with not a <? or $ in sight any more.
Ahhh, I've heard of stories like that. CEO or someone not involved in code tells web dev to switch to ASP (he read that ASP, Application Service Providers, were the next big thing). They can't talk him out of it so they change all extentsion to .htm and route those files through the CFML server. Switching extensions could be a good decoy, for security reasons too.
It was the system architects that I was chatting to and they seemed to support the move whole heartedly - of cause they could just be towing the company line of cause - my job there was in a "business" rather than IT context but it is always good to talk to the people designing the architecture for corporate scale websites etc.
Naw: even in respective languages, coldfusion will always hold power over PHP just due to the fact that it is not open source.
the difference in salaries will always exists because almost everyone starts developping web applications in php. every kid uses PHP while the java community is more dedicated to companies who can spend money on java courses and training.
The gap has closed so that I could consider taking a PHP focused job and still afford an Orange County mortgage whereas 5 years ago I could afford a studio apartment next to the runway at John Wayne airport for what I was offered for php jobs. Java has a foothold in corporations but corporations do look at cost and productivity. I was with a company that decided to go from a rapid application development tool to Java. Ten Java developers accomplished less in 8 months then 2 RAD developers did in two months. They let 9 of ten Java developers go less than a year later and kept all the RAD developers.
You do have to look at the size of the company and its long term future. Myspace was originally developed in CFM however when they started making it massive they then had to move to the .Net framework for its scalability. You can get a massive salary on PHP but many of the companies I have seen offering these salaries at the moment are very reminiscent of the 90s dot com boom. This isnt to say all of them will fail but I suspect there isnt a long term future in all of them. The tell tale element is looking at blue chip companies. Many still use JSP with a gradual movement across to .Net - I personally cannot think of one "traditional" blue chip company that actually uses PHP at this point. There are a few that have files with php file extensions but in reality they are remapped to a Java or .Net framework. Of cause you can still make your money and fame with fly by night companies but then you are looking at a whole different skill set. My ex-boss was a perfect example of this - despite his history in insurance and banking (and the billions he has made from it) his true skill was talking the talk and knowing when to enter and when to leave. He was actually an exceptional programmer but his ability to talk the talk and to read the market was the actual skill that got him where he got before he took the "r" word Of cause the second element is really what you enjoy doing.... I would not have left my life as an employee if life was about salary. My career before leaving the life of the employed will almost certainly have been earning more than I will ever earn either with Astaroth Solutions or my consultancy work both the boon and the curse of my previous job was that I was working 30 hours a day 9 days a week and so the salary I earned was in reality 3x the end salary because for the few days a year I could actually take off I was too tired to actually spend any of the money I was earning (plus spending weeks a month away from home you really lost the "keeping up with the jones" menality for home because you were never there!) PHP salaries are lower than Java & .Net and to be honest I think it will always will be if you want job security too - but if it is what you enjoy doing then that is more important than the number of 0s in your pay cheque
ColdFusion scalability is not a real issue. ColdFusion's scalability is a combination of the scalability of Java byte code (what CF is at runtime), scalability of the database, and efficient coding. Many successful start ups take off with the rapid development languages and then hire enterprise type CIOs, Directors, etc and they discard what's in place to go with there choice of .NET or Java. There are plenty of stories of unjustifed language or platform changes. Some are not doing objective evaluations.