Expert Marc Andreessen beliefs PHP will be more popular than Java for building Web-based applications.

Wednesday, in Burlingame - California, at the Zend/PHP Conference, Marc Andreessen - a browser pioneer - kept a speech expressing his beliefs about PHP and Java future. Sun’s platform had a great success after its release back in 1995 because it was well optimized but lately became like its predecessors.

“Java is much more programmer-friendly than C or C++, or was for a few years there until they made just as complicated. It’s become arguably even harder to learn than C++”.

Even-though many Java fans don’t agree with this opinion, there are some influential people in the IT industry like IBM’s executive, Rod Smith who is concerned about the situation. “Simplicity is a huge part of it,” he said about PHP. “They weren’t interested in adding language features to compete with other languages,” choosing instead “the simple way, and not the way we’ve done it in Java, unfortunately”. not to forget that IBM was instrumental in bringing Java to the server and whose WebSphere server software has Java at its core.

PHP is a popular open-source, reflective programming language used mainly for developing server-side applications and dynamic web content, and more recently, other software. Originally, PHP stood for “Personal Home Page”. Today, the official meaning is the recursive acronym “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”. Some fans of this language also use the label “Pretty Hypertext Preprocessor”.

“Java and PHP compete at some level. Get over it,” Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse, said in a meeting with reporters. Eclipse is an open-source programming-tool project that long supported Java and now also supports PHP. “I’m looking forward to PHP kicking butt in the marketplace,” Milinkovich said.