That sort of uniformity does not exist in the PHP world, which makes it hard/difficult/impossible to write IDEs which can take advantage of the ‘one’ way of doing something. Sure, you could write your own grid/pagination code in .NET for an ASP page, but why? However, you’re ‘forced’/'allowed’ to choose from multiple options in the PHP world, so many so that ‘rolling your own’ often becomes a viable option as opposed to researching/testing all the available options.

Too much choice at the mechanical level can be viewed as a bad thing. Go find 10 PHP books and they’ll all show you different ways of handling form processing and session management. Go find 10 .NET books and you’ll find pretty 10 examples all using the same techniques and code samples (for the most part).

Innovation gets tricky when everyone uses your language. PHP is a victim of its success. It aimed from the beginning to become a rival to ASP, and it has succeeded wildly. Of course, innovation loses market share sometimes, and last time I checked , Zend was a _business_.

You have drag and drop available to you in a bunch of forms already, for gui development. Just use a tool “stack” instead of some monolithic thing.

Silverlight: Please someone show me the market penetration for this product before we compare it to Flash… Is it even done yet?

“Historically, I’ve used Microsoft development environments because they made my life easier. It’s hard to look at this list and see how it’s any easier than the open source alternatives. I also begin to look longingly at the open source developers who have been plugging away productively in Perl or Python over the last five years. Sometimes, you wonder if choosing an environment where things change more slowly isn’t a better long term evolutionary decision. Perhaps there’s a kernel of truth in Paul Graham’s sensationalist Microsoft is Dead article: can you even name any startups that use Microsoft development tools?”

You inspired me to write a full post on the subject of PHP and where it is going, and what we need to do about it. If you get a chance please have a read – 10 Reasons why PHP is still very much Alive

I know in reality we all have to write a lot of the view code as there are not enough developer/designers out there who are proficient enough programmers and good enough designers.

For all the visual aids I have worked and or seen working none of them have produced decent code or in fact sped up the process. The flow design in something like Weblogic looks amazing but I can bet you I can write the code quicker myself than you twiddling around with what looks like Microsoft Visio.

The fact is right now the tools available can only ever cope with most simple of examples and certainly not for a complex application (which is what we want them for)

I guess, if anything, the languages in which we write (and show) graphical interfaces could use a face lift. The combination of html/css/javascript(/xml) is pretty flexible but very inconsistent (and thus, requires much effort) Ironically, the company behind the so great ide and technologies has played a huge role in this.

Also, php has some advantages over its competitors. (as well as disadvantages). I assume we all know what they are. Don’t forget those too!