Sorry Alex, I afraid I'm not a WebApps guy.

I've never used PHP, and the little bits of playing I've done with Apache and MySQL would just about qualify me to dust the manuals of these large and complex beasts.

If you have questions regarding WebApps and which language to use, you'll need to be somewhat more specific about the type of webapp you are going to code and ask the question as a top level SoPW. That way you will get the benefit of the (probably 100s of) years of accumulated experience of the many monks here who do this for a living and have done so for many years.

If you give an accurate enough description of your application, you'll even find that if it is such that it would be better suited to being written in PHP rather than Perl, there are several Monks who will be prepared to stand up and say so, despite the obvious predaliction of the majority here towards Perl:)

My own experience of WebApps is a) from a few years ago. b) were written in a secure intranet environment rather than an insecure internet facing position -- which is a very important distinction. c) Were written for an "all MS" shop, and were therefore IIS/SQL Server based.