Friendster has gone PHP. This has rekindled the dogged PHP scalability wars. Friendster was a notable Java installation and going PHP doesn't bode well for the perception of Java as a major we player.
Chris Shiflett weighed in and cited several sources about PHP Scalability. He said that my article was wrong because performance != scalability. I agree that performance is not scalability, but it is the first issue that Java folks raise about PHP because it's a scripting language. So in my article I decided to tackle the performance issue in isolation. Although I went to the trouble in the preface of the article, to state that scalability was not just about performance.
He goes on to say that this post got it right, and I agree, but the comments after the post prove that you have to get Java folks to move past the performance argument first before you can talk about other scalability issues. Like the availability of talent, the maintainability of the language, the fact that less code is less bugs, and so on.