The Case for PHP and MySQL

Unapologetically, my objective in this article is to show that PHP and MySQL are both mature and widespread technologies that can be considered a primary web-application platform, not just an alternative to ASP, JSP, Cold Fusion and a host of other web-app scripting solutions out there. I'm developing this article in an evolutionary way and will add as I see trends, get new data, have new ideas for how to discover the case for PHP. According to some stats, there are over 12,000,000 sites on the internet now running PHP. So, what's behind that and why is it so popular?