Is Java getting better with age? | Newsmakers | CNET News.com: "Let's talk about some of the points that have been brought up. Evans Data had a study showing that use of Java has been going down in North America for the past two-and-a-half years, although it's been going up in Asia. PHP and other scripting languages are getting more popular and robust. And if you look at Web 2.0 companies, it seems that lot of them are using AJAX, which involves scripting.
Gosling: Well, AJAX is just a style of using JavaScript to build advanced things. It's pretty cool, but it certainly has its problems.

Right. Then there are books like 'Beyond Java,' which says that Java is great for some things but for Web development, other development languages and frameworks are better. So, what's your reaction to that? Do you think that it's well-founded?
Gosling: Well, there's bits of both. When you take a look at something like PHP, which is totally focused on doing just Web development--if you're just generating a Web page, PHP is actually pretty good. It's almost a clone of JSP (Java Server Pages), pretty much is exactly a clone of JSP.

The place where I think it's getting messy is when you go beyond something that is purely Web page generation. As soon as you start doing much analysis or integration with other kinds of computation, it gets difficult because something like PHP is very focused on Web page generation."