With the growth of development platforms like Ruby on Rails and Node.js you might be temped to think that demand for the by now old school language PHP might be starting to decline. But judging by a survey of PHP developers conducted by PHP server vendor Zend Technologies, you’d be wrong. Of the respondents, only 9% saw less demand for PHP skills while 55% saw more demand and 36% saw no significant difference.

The survey of PHP developers, with 3,335 respondents, is the first in a series called Zend Developer Pulse, an initiative aimed at learning more about developers and the technologies they are using. You can find the full report here.

Zend clearly has an interest in promoting survey results that show PHP growing, but don’t forget that PHP still powers much of the Web. Facebook, Farmville and all those other Zynga games, Wikipedia, all those WordPress blogs, all those Drupal and Joomla sites, and so much more are all coded in PHP. Other sources cited in the survey include oDesk, which lists PHP as its most demanded programming language, and Indeed.com which shows that PHP is posting the largest job growth among several popular development languages:

Here are some interesting results from the survey:

• 66% expect to work on mobile development in 2012
• 48% expect to produce APIs
• 40% expect to work with big data

Although, according to the survey, there’s a tendency for PHP developers to spend most of their time working with PHP, the majority also work with JavaScript:

User interfaces were the top career development priority for the respondents, with 75% citing “next generation UI” as an important area for their careers. That was followed by mobile development, with 67% of respondents labeling it important.

Of the 39% of respondents who do plan to use the public cloud in 2012, 30% said they will be using Amazon Web Services, 28% said they were undecided and 10% said they will use Rackspace. No other public cloud got more than 10%. Developers at large companies – greater than 5,000 employees – were most likely (52%) to say that cloud-based development was a key area for career focus.

The report sheds some light on what’s going on in application development. Thanks to open source technologies like HipHop from Facebook and PHP-FPM, along with newer (compared to Apache) Web servers like Ngnix and Lightspeed, PHP can compete with other languages on performance. Although classic languages like PHP aren’t going away, developers are increasingly interested in cloud, mobile and big data development. It’s these new frontiers that aren’t driving technology.