I don't see how it's going to beat Perl, which already lets you do the same things, but inside a full-fledged programming language. Many webmasters and server a

I don't see how it's going to beat Perl, which already lets you do the same things, but inside a full-fledged programming language. Many webmasters and server admins have already learned some Perl, and it's considered very easy to use (and even easier when you try to read other people's code). I looked at PHP/FI for my own homepage before, but it's really nothing more than a rudimentary template language, a slightly more powerful version of httpd's Server Side Includes. Rasmus (the developer) seems to be quite happy with keeping it simple. Perhaps you'll be lucky and he'll change his mind and convert it to a full scripting language. Heh, maybe we'll even get two frustrated undergrad students who hate Perl to rewrite the parser so they can use it to write their computer science project. Maybe you'll even be very lucky and somebody will decide to write a popular system for writing web journals in PHP/FI that would take over the world (but how many people would be so self-absorbed as to maintain a web journal anyway). And you still don't have the database and hardware side covered. PHP/FI seems to support mSQL. mSQL is cheap for commercial use, but still not free, and it doesn't even support JOINs! And you also need a server. You also need a server. httpd used to be cool, but NCSA is no longer maintaining that. There's a serious of patches running around, so you could just run a patchy version of httpd, but how far will that take you? Next you need a proper OS to run that thing on, but while we're all waiting for GNU Hurd, there's a guy from Finland who made a free *nix OS that's been gaining quite some traction recently. These Scandinavian guys are full of surprises. Maybe you'll be lucky again and there's yet another guy in Finland waiting to unleash a free software SQL database with joins, who knows.