PHP powers a staggering 32.84% of the world wide web, which makes it an important player in the web server space. According to Alexia.com as of December 2008, three out of the top ten sites in the entire world (Yahoo!, Facebook, Wikipedia) are using PHP for their main infrastructure.

In addition, virtually every hosting solution provider has a PHP hosting plan. Compared to Java's rate of adoption in this area, it is a no-contest in PHP's favor. A major factor for this popularity is PHP's simplicity and ease-of-use. PHP's C-like syntax and its extensive libraries makes it very easy for novices and professionals alike to create a dynamic website that communicates with a database in no time. Unfortunately, we cannot say the same about Java.

Quercus aims to solve the performance problems of PHP by completely re-implementing the standard PHP interpreter in Java. Quercus is coded entirely in Java and it can take advantage of being run in a long-lived environment of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). There are countless opportunities for Quercus to cache reoccurring data and state like a pool for database connections to virtually eliminate the overhead of the database connection handshake.