I like Rafe’s blog quite a lot. I’ve been reading it for years. He’s a Java guy, but I don’t usually hold that against him, until he starts railing against PHP (especially when it’s actually PEAR that’s his problem). As someone who has set up Tomcat and managed to get it working, and wasted plenty of evenings trying to wrap my head around Java, there’s no comparison between the amount of nonsense you have to go through to do even the most simple thing in Java and the beautiful simplicity of PHP. If you don’t like it, code something else.