Why PHP is so much more popular for web-development

[Diez B. Roggisch]

> Before you can even get started with Python web-development, you have
> to understand this entire alphabit soup of: CGI, FASTCGI, MOD_PYTHON,
> FLUP, WSGI, PASTE, etc. For me, configuring fastcgi has been the most
> difficult part of getting django to work. PHP developers don't have to
> bother with anything like that. With PHP, you just throw some code in
> the middle of your html file.

Which is simply because they are preconfigured. If you have ever tried 
to recompile a PHP installation because it misses e.g. oracle support.

> Also, PHP, and PHP frameworks, are supported everywhere. If you going
> to use a PHP MVC framework, like codeignitor, you would have a hard
> time finding a hoster that didn't support it - all you need is php4
> and mysql. Dollar-hosting, for $10 a year, should work just fine with
> codeignitor. With codeignitor, just copy your files to whatever host,
> and that's it, you're done.
> 
> By contrast, the most popular Python frameworks have sky-high system
> requirements. Take a look at the requirements and/or recomendations
> for popular Python frameworks like Django, TurboGears, or CherryPy:
> Apache 2.0, mod_python (latest version), fastcgi (at least), command
> line access, PostgreSQL. And a lot of low-cost hosters don't support
> Python at all.
> 
> Don't get me wrong: I am not saying that PHP is better than Python for
> web-development. But, I sometimes think that Python could learn a few
> things from PHP.

I don't see that amongst the above is anything that python could learn. 
Using turbogears, a simple

tg-admin quickstart

followed by a

./start-<projectname>.py

is all you need. The templating system is simple, allows for embedded 
python (to some extend, and a healthy one), database-support & 
model-stuff is easy.

The cheap hosting and preconfigured apache setups are things that only 
the market can solve.

Diez