I abandoned PHP about two years back. 8 months ago, after going to a conference and hearing the folks at Flickr talk, specifically Cal Henderson (http://www.krisjordan.com/2008/09/16/cal-henderson-scalable-...) I got re-energized to take another stab at making PHP pleasant to work with.
The results of my last push evolved into a PHP framework: Recess. (http://www.recessframework.org) It's got annotations for a declarative, meta-programming style. It's inherently RESTful (and more fine-grained content negotiation is coming soon). The Models/ORM are lazy so that you can chain together queries that evaluate at the last minute. Recess deploys just fine to commodity $5/mo servers and was designed to be lightweight and fast without giving up object-oriented design (a la Code Igniter).
What I feel gets lost in the "PHP is terrible" literature is a distinction between PHP as a programming language and PHP as a technology / platform. As a programming language, from an academic perspective, PHP is embarrassing. As a technology/platform it's incredibly well suited for web applications because that's exactly its intention. PHP's shared-nothing execution model, simple deployment, efficiency & performance make it a great technology for authoring web applications. Tooling has gotten much better too with Eclipse's PDT & XDebug.
If you're growing tired of PHP and looking for a platform/framework to develop on that is more productive and enjoyable try taking Recess for a spin. For me, at least, it's made PHP fun again: http://www.recessframework.org/
The results of my last push evolved into a PHP framework: Recess. (http://www.recessframework.org) It's got annotations for a declarative, meta-programming style. It's inherently RESTful (and more fine-grained content negotiation is coming soon). The Models/ORM are lazy so that you can chain together queries that evaluate at the last minute. Recess deploys just fine to commodity $5/mo servers and was designed to be lightweight and fast without giving up object-oriented design (a la Code Igniter).
What I feel gets lost in the "PHP is terrible" literature is a distinction between PHP as a programming language and PHP as a technology / platform. As a programming language, from an academic perspective, PHP is embarrassing. As a technology/platform it's incredibly well suited for web applications because that's exactly its intention. PHP's shared-nothing execution model, simple deployment, efficiency & performance make it a great technology for authoring web applications. Tooling has gotten much better too with Eclipse's PDT & XDebug.
If you're growing tired of PHP and looking for a platform/framework to develop on that is more productive and enjoyable try taking Recess for a spin. For me, at least, it's made PHP fun again: http://www.recessframework.org/