ReadWriteWeb

Once upon a time, the default stack for a lot of developers consisted of the LAMP stack. Linux, Apache, MySQL and one of the P triumvirate: PHP, Python or Perl. Those days, however, are over. Sure, Linux is still powering a lot of servers. But above that, almost everything is up for grabs. Today at the Monki Gras conference in London, Simon Willison of held forth on the new Web stack.

Willison was part of the day's last talk, a conversation with Matt Biddulph, formerly Nokia's head of data strategy for location and commerce applications.

Udemy has put together an infographic that compares Ruby, PHP and Python. This looks (briefly) at the history, popularity, ease of use, demand for programmers, benchmarks and more for each language. If you're job-hunting, Udemy says that you probably want to know PHP above Ruby or Python.

According to Udemy, Python is the "most-discussed" language, followed by PHP and Ruby. The rankings come from IEEE Spectrum's analysis of IRC discussions. Udemy also looks at the TIOBE Index, where PHP outranks Ruby and Python.

By now, most folks have heard of phishing scams, and know to be on the lookout for fake PayPal and bank sign-ons. But what happens when your co-workers get a link to a site that looks just like the corporate intranet? Using the Simple Phishing Toolkit (SPT) you can find out.

The concept behind SPT is pretty simple: Most companies spend a fair amount of money on trying to secure their environment. How much do they spend on educating users? Very little, and in many cases nothing at all. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is much better than a pound of cure.

Facebook is announcing a new execution engine for PHP in order to try to boost performance. Facebook introduced HipHop for PHP nearly two years ago. Today the company announced a new tool in the HipHop toolbox, which it claims is 60% faster, with a 90% reduction in memory cost.

Facebook engineer Jason Evans writes that the company put together a team last year to replace the HipHop interpreter (HPHPi). Today they're taking the lid off of the new HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) which will replace HPHPi and eventually be used in production.

This morning, Fraser Howard and the security researchers of Sophos Labs are reporting this discovery: The recent wave of Web site defacement attacks, including one against the outreach site for the National Cyber Security Alliance, appear to have a common source: Something is injecting malicious <IFRAME> elements into the front pages of everyday Web servers.

What makes this particular malicious injection different from thousands of others, Howard learned, is that the injected PHP code quite cleverly checks the URL and user-agent string of the requesting client, to determine whether the client is accessing the page through a search engine link, such as Google.

There must be something in the air. Heroku and Engine Yard are beefing up their platforms today. Engine Yard put JRuby into general availability today after several months in testing and years of development.

Not to be left out, Heroku expanded its service to add Python and Django as part of its "polyglot platform."

AppFog tomorrow will announce adding support for Ruby and Node.js to its collection of PHP solutions for developing Web apps. You can scale up and manage your apps with all three languages. With AppFog, users can set up ready-for-code servers quickly and deploy them with just a single command. The company recognizes the growth of both Ruby and Node.js and has a community of 20,000 developers who have deployed 10,000 apps using its developer tools.

The company has a private beta for hosting on CloudFoundry as well.

Engine Yard is moving well beyond its roots. On August 23rd, the company signed an agreement to acquire Orchestra to add PHP to its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings. Now it's announcing plans to add to its database stack.

In a post last week, Engine Yard's Ines Sombra outlined plans to upgrade the MySQL implementation, and expand the database stack to PostgreSQL 9 and MongoDB.

You know there's a slight problem somewhere when a developer uses words like "hell fire" to refer to a project. When it comes to Etherpad, the popular collaborative editor, it's not the concept that's problematic, it's the delivery.

Thankfully, the Etherpad Foundation has put two years into delivering a kinder and gentler version. Called Etherpad Lite, it streamlines the original into something more manageable to install and run."

Following a private beta, the platform-as-a-service (hosted on Amazon Web Services) PHP Fog is now generally available following a private beta. It has a free option offering 100MG of storage, a single domain name and 15GB of bandwidth. Paid plans start at $29 a month.

A few months ago, PHP PaaSes were rare. PHP Fog competed with Orchestra and few others. But in recent weeks VMware and Red Hat have announced new PaaS offerings that include PHP support. Still, given the popularity of PHP-based applications like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, there could be room for several PHP platforms on the market.