The Community
The most significant achievement of the PHP core developers was the release of PHP 5.3 in July. PHP 5.3 is the most significant release of PHP since PHP 5 itself, and brings many new features to the language. The PHP website has a nice overview of the new features. If you haven't looked at PHP 5.3 by now, I can recommend it; it's another significant step forward in the evolution of PHP.

In the wider PHP community, we saw the launch of CodeWorks, a new type of conference touring across the US, and a rise in popularity of Joind.in, which is rapidly becoming the tool of choice for conference organizers and speakers to collect reviews of their talks.

After a period of absence, the phpa podcast was revived and is better than it ever was; listen to its episodes over here.

One announcement in the community caused quite a bit of controversy: the launch of a PHP standards group, initiated by several of the leading PHP frameworks. Stefan Koopmanschap has a good description of both the concept and the controversy on his blog.

A final thing I'd like to mention is PHP6. Like in 2008, 2009 was full of talk about PHP6, but there hasn't been a release yet. Maybe in 2010?

Enterprise Adoption and Professional PHP Use
In 2009, we saw a continuation of PHP's rise in the enterprise, and again a focus on more professional PHP development. Now that PHP is in the top 3 of programming languages, it's only natural that we see this happening. In 2009 we saw the launch of several websites targeted at professional developers. One example is Ian Barber's phpir.com site, dedicated at sophisitaced information retrieval with PHP, another is the launch of our own techPortal, built by Cal Evans and now maintained by Lorna Mitchell.

I also noticed a rise in popularity of tools such as memcached (distributed caching), GearMan (message and job queue) and Apache Solr (sophisticated search). We saw talks on these tools on most of the major PHP conferences, and I expect coverage at 2010 conferences as well.

Another enterprise concept gaining momentum is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). More and more of the projects we build at Ibuildings have elements of SOA or full fledged SOA solutions. I've written a whitepaper to help explain the concept to IT managers that are new to this technology. Lorna Mitchell is one of our developers covering services in conference presentations to help spread knowledge on this topic.

Industry Participation
A testament of PHP's professional growth is the participation of the wider tech industry. Most notable is Microsoft's embrace of PHP as one of the technology choices for its Windows platform. With the launch of the Web Platform Installer, which can install PHP on the Windows platform, and the accompanying App Gallery which allows people to install PHP apps easily, Microsoft has demonstrated that it is taking PHP very seriously. Near the end of the year Microsoft released WinCache, an accelerator to improve the speed of PHP on Windows. We benchmarked WinCache and the results looked very positive. Contrary to Microsoft's classic and feared 'embrace and extend' strategy, they've chosen to be completely open, and released WinCache as an open source PECL extension.

The Big Boys in 2009
There are a number of big commercial players in the PHP ecosystem, and they haven't been silent in 2009. Zend has released Zend Server, which is a step up from their previous Zend Platform product. It's targeted at professional PHP installations and there's both a free community edition and a commercially supported edition. Zend also received quite a bit of attention with the launch of the SimpleCloud API, a partnership with various cloud vendors to make cloud programming easier in PHP.

php|architect has a number of changes. After moving to a full-color edition of php|architect magazine in 2008, in late 2009 they moved to become a digital only magazine. Also, they launched the new CodeWorks conference metioned earlier in this post.

At Ibuildings (with 85 people I'm proud to say that we're now one of the big players as well), we had various developments, including a new Italian office in Milan and the launch of techPortal. The development I'm most proud of is that we managed to grow the Dutch PHP Conference into a multi-day event, becoming one of the major PHP conferences worldwide.

The Wider Web
2009 saw a number of developments that are not directly related to PHP, but very relevant to PHP developers nonetheless. The first item to mention is the launch of Google Chrome, a new browser that rapidly generated a lot of buzz. PHP developers are quite accustomed to having to develop applications for multiple different browsers, but with the release of Google Chrome it's no longer sufficient to test in Firefox, IE and Safari. From what I've seen so far though, Chrome is very developer friendly, strictly adhering to standards.

We also noticed a growth in the use of netbooks, and with the iphone, the mobile web is finally taking shape. PHP developers need to take these developments into account, if only because it requires paying attention to smaller screens and screen resolutions.

Finally, Twitter seems to have exploded. When Oprah starts to use it, you know it's mainstream. Twitter has decent APIs, and clients will want PHP developers to integrate their apps with Twitter, so this is definitely a relevant development for PHP developers.

The Economy and the Job Market
The last topic I want to cover in my 2009 overview, is the economy. In 2009, the economic crisis hit Europe, and at Ibuildings we noticed the effects of the crisis in most of our territories, making it more difficult to grow. Luckily, the last couple of months we witnessed a turnaround, and by now we're again in a position where we find customers more easily than good developers. So we're still hiring, if you're interested.

We see similar trends around us, with most web agencies starting to grow again and having a filled order portfolio for the next couple of months.

For PHP developers, the job market was a bit more difficult during 2009, but near the end of the year, it should've been relatively easy to find jobs again. If not, I'm sure that in 2010 it will be even better.

Speaking of the job market, an interesting thing happened in 2009, with an unusual amount of PHP community celebrities switching jobs. The list includes the likes of Derick Rethans, Andrei Zmievski, Chris Shiflett, Scott MacVicar, Cal Evans, Sebastian Bergmann and Eli White. Several of them have started new PHP companies that we'll definitely hear more about in 2010 and beyond. Andrei and Chris started Analog, where 'good people do good work', and Sebastian started the PHP consulting company together with Arne Blankerts and Stefan Priebsch.

Conclusion
And that concludes my wrap-up of 2009. As you can see, it was an interesting year with a lot of developments. If 2010 will be only half as eventful as 2009, we're still going to see yet another very interesting year for PHP!