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 dot-com boom venture capitalists expected startups to build their so- tions on the latest and greatest Oracle/Solaris/WebLogic combo. It was very much a culture of ?Java is the solution. What?s the problem?? Paying ridiculous prices such as tens of thousands of dollars per CPU did not stop anyone from buying these solutions, and the majority of projects really weren?t using the enterprise features they paid for. This was very familiar to the well-known saying, ?No one gets fired for buying IBM. ? With the dot-com bust, companies started to realize they needed to get the most out of their investment. PHP went through a very strong period of growth during those years, including early penetration within business-critical enterprise applications.