In the middle of the dot.com bust when many very good technologies are going under or merging away, PHP has been growing at 230% annual rate. Software vendors that would take 1/10th that rate and be very happy indeed.

1. PHP is a server-side interpreter which is Open Source and free;

2. PHP provides familiar syntax to C, Perl and Java developers;

3. PHP has fast connections to popular databases;

4. PHP has fast native connections to the Open Source MySQL database;

5. PHP runs reliably on Windows, Linux and Mac servers and clients;

6. PHP web pages run reliably on all the popular browsers;

7. PHP's associative arrays are very useful for UI and database applications;

8. PHP's object oriented classes are easy to understand;

9. PHP has been very promiscuous-linking to PDF, SWF, XML, Java etc.