In the recent ‘State of PHP and Zend Framework Development’ survey by Zend Technologies 85% of PHP developers surveyed named Linux as their primary operating system while 11% named Windows and 2% named Mac OS X. However when asked to name their primary operating system for development, 42% named Windows versus 38.5% who chose Linux and 19.1% who chose Mac OS X.

ActiveState Software has announced the release of Komodo IDE 5.1. Komodo 5.1 claims to provide dynamic language expertise for Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Tcl, plus JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and XML, and template languages like RHTML, Template-Toolkit, HTML-Smarty, and Django.

The Parrot Foundation has released Parrot 1.0, the first in a series of “Supported” releases. The Parrot virtual machine hosts dynamic languages such as Ruby, Python, PHP, and Perl. In addition to standard features expected of any modern virtual machine — including concurrency, garbage collection, bytecode and JIT compilation, event and exception handling, Unicode, dynamic dispatch, and support for procedural, object-oriented, and functional paradigms — Parrot provides a powerful suite of compiler tools tailored to dynamic languages and a next generation regular expression engine.

“Dynamic languages have become a hot topic for commercial and academic R&D,” said Allison Randal, Architect of Parrot and Chairman of the Parrot Foundation, “and Parrot has been right at the heart of it from the beginning. 1.0 marks an important milestone for the project, where we can invite a broad community of developers to explore the cutting-edge features we’ve enjoyed for years.”

Parrot VM 1.0.0 is available on Parrot’s FTP site, or follow the download instructions.

Given the increasing interest in dynamic languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP along with the increasing threat perception to Java, Dhananjay Nene talks about his experience with using these languages and how they distinguish themselves from Java. The session “Contrasting Java and Dynamic Languages” will also discuss the role of Java based scripting languages such as Groovy, JRuby and Jython.