Seat 5D, Continental Flight 449B, someplace over North America In the late 90s, PHP was still referred to mockingly by many computer science gra- ates as a scripting language. Lack of strict typing was the number one reason it was not viewed as ready for prime time. At that time most computer science graduates were developing either in C or C++, or picking up Java, and therefore there was a strong bias in the IT community. Although PHP grew rapidly during this period and among other things displaced Perl on the Web, it still was not widely considered an enterprise-ready solution. During the...