Why PHP Usage Has Declined by 40% in Just Over 2 Years

The latest monthly update of the TIOBE index asks, “Is PHP losing its mojo?” For the month of April, TIOBE’s programming language index ranked PHP 17th, “its lowest position ever.” It’s not just TIOBE that shows PHP declining in popularity. In the annual Stack Overflow developer survey, PHP has fallen from 30.7% in 2018 (i.e. … Read more

FediForum Showcases New Fediverse Apps and Developer Network

This week I attended FediForum, a two-day virtual event about fediverse technologies. The fediverse is a decentralized network of apps that connect together via the W3C ActivityPub protocol. Its biggest and most well-known app is Mastodon, the microblogging platform that Meta’s Threads is currently in the process of interconnecting with (via ActivityPub). What FediForum showed … Read more

The Future of Websites in the Age of AI and SEO Decline

There’s a lot of concern amongst website builders about the impact AI will have on web traffic. And it’s not just AI that web developers have to worry about. Google is phasing out third-party cookies by the end of 2024, social media referrals continue to decline, and mobile application platforms have a checkered history of … Read more

Apple vs. Web Apps: Why Open Web Advocacy Is Fighting Back

Open Web Advocacy (OWA) is a non-profit organization founded by two brothers, Alex and James Moore, who run a web development services company in Australia. They’re up in arms about Apple’s decision to effectively withdraw support for progressive web apps (PWAs) in Europe, as a way to comply with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act … Read more

Writer.com’s Graph-Based RAG Alternative to Vector Retrieval

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the most common method of integrating a pre-trained large language model (LLM) with an external data source; an important factor in creating enterprise AI applications. After all, what’s the point of an organization using an LLM if it can’t utilize its own unique — and probably proprietary — data set? RAG … Read more

Gemma: Google Takes on Small Open Models Llama 2 and Mistral

Today Google is announcing two new AI models: Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B. Each of the models is released “with pre-trained and instruction-tuned variants.” In a press briefing, Tris Warkentin, the director of Google DeepMind, described the new models as “a new family of state-of-the-art smaller models, which will enable developers to do research and … Read more

Remix Takes on Next.js in Battle of the React Frameworks

The JavaScript frameworks Remix and Astro are currently getting a lot of buzz as simpler alternatives to Next.js, the dominant framework of the React era. Of the two upstart frameworks, Remix is more of a direct competitor to Next.js, since they are both based on the React library (Astro is framework-agnostic, so you can use … Read more