Why PHP Is The Best Choice For Web Development

PHP is a server-side scripting, or coding language, that is used mostly for the backend web development for web applications.

It can be used to develop small, static web pages to big and complex content management systems (CMS). Be it to make a personal blog, a corporate website, or a large-scale enterprise application, one can do it with PHP.

Presently, PHP also has a massive, active community of developers contributing to its continued success. On top of all that, there are also a whole lot of frameworks, libraries, and tools that will help speed up development and increase code quality manifold.

In this blog, we'll delve into the reasons why developers continue to go for PHP web development.

Quick summary

If you’ve been grappling with the “why use PHP today” questions, you’re at the right place!

At a glance, this blog brings together all the possible reasons why you should think about building your projects with PHP.

From understanding how PHP came to exist, to the many ways PHP can be a perfect choice for your web applications, and the many advantages of using PHP, you can get all the information here.

PHP History

Before you wonder, “What is PHP in web development?” Let's brush up on the history of PHP.

PHP was born back in 1994 when Rasmus Lerdorf developed a simple set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts for tracking visitors to his personal home page.

He expanded this to communicate with databases and web forms and later called this PHP/FI (Forms Interpreter). The package of scripts was later renamed as 'Personal Home Page Tools' and was publicized as PHP Tools.

What is PHP?

PHP is quite a popular server-side scripting language that is primarily chosen for web development. This scripting language can create dynamic content while simultaneously also remaining connected with databases.

PHP grew in popularity owing to its efficiency and versatility in creating web applications. Since it is open source, and is cross-platform compatible, there is also an active and extensive community support presence.

Also read this article : Top 12 JavaScript Development Tools for Developers

What tools does PHP use?

Using various PHP tools can definitely enhance your coding process. PHP’s many libraries and classes work seamlessly to enhance web development. Some of the most commonly used tools include:

1. Debugging Tools

• Xdebug: it is a popular PHP extension that provides debugging and profiling features for developers.
• Zend Debugger: Zend is another powerful PHP debugger that integrates with popular IDEs.

2. Testing Tools

• PHPUnit: PHPUnit is a popularly used unit testing framework in PHP.
• Codeception: PHP’s full-stack testing framework, Codeception combines functional, and unit testing for PHP developers.

3. Optimization Tools

• Xdebug profiler: this tool can be used to profile PHP code and also identify performance bottlenecks.
• Blackfire IO: This tool is a cloud-based performance monitoring tool.

4. Security Tools

• Security scanners: Nessus, Acunetix, and OWASP ZAP are some PHP tools that scan web applications for security vulnerabilities.
• Code analyzers: PHPStan and Psalm can analyze PHP code for potential security issues. These tools are one of the most important in PHP web development.

5. Utilities and Classes

• PHP Standard Library: As a developer, you can use PHP’s collection of built-in functions and classes that can be used for various tasks.
• Composer: The composer tool is actually a dependency manager for PHP that can allow you to easily manage third-party libraries.

Of course, there exist more than a couple of tools that you can utilize in PHP, but we’ve mentioned only two for each category for now.

How can PHP help you?

PHP has been holding down the fort for many mainstream websites for very many years now. Even if PHP might seem lacking in comparison to the newer coding languages, it also isn’t going anywhere.

If you’re thinking of making up a web application from scratch, then PHP can be a classic tool that simply can’t let you down. Here are some of the reasons why:

• Fast Development: PHP is quite simple and easy to use; hence, and it proves its efficacy in rapidly developing web-based applications.
• Affordability: PHP is a free, open-source server-side coding language, and therefore does not require any licensing.
• Scalability: Out-of-the-box, PHP can also handle a great amount of traffic and the process of complex applications, hence it checks all your boxes for developing projects, from low-scale up to large-scale ones.
• Community support: PHP has a huge community that is pretty active and has detailed documentation, tutorials, and forums to which you could teach yourself or solve your developer issues.
• Versatility: If you have to build both a website and a complex web application, PHP is an umbrella word for your projects. It can run small websites as well as web applications.

Why Is PHP So Popular?

It is no surprise that with all its advantages listed above, PHP is still popular. Some of the factors contributing to this include the fact that syntax in PHP is relatively simple or more accessible to both experienced and inexperienced developers.

It is a versatile language that supports great domain coverage for web development tasks, and it also introduces high performance, especially when used with various caching methods.

Besides, the myriad of useful resources, the integration of many useful tools and technologies, the active community of PHP developers, and the extensive support, just waiting to be tapped into is what makes PHP still reign supreme.

Examples of websites using PHP

Web development using PHP has been quite a driving force behind many of the most popular websites on the internet that we know today.

Let's explore how PHP has been used in some of the biggest names in web development:

1. Facebook

According to a Facebook engineering blog post, PHP was initially used for the core parts of the website, including the news feed, user profiles, and messaging.

HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) was the version of PHP used by Facebook. The best result of this? Facebook has more than 3 billion active monthly users now! This has also led to many updates in PHP itself over the years.

2. Wikipedia

The largest free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, relies heavily on PHP for backend operations. Primarily, it is the MediaWiki software, which powers Wikipedia that is written in PHP. This allows for efficient content management, collaboration, and search functionality.
And if you know the number of edits that are done on Wikipedia per minute, you know how efficient PHP is!

3. Mailchimp

Mailchimp, the popular email marketing platform, with more than 13 million global customers, is also built on a PHP-based architecture. Some of the PHP powered features can be seen in the platform features like automation, email campaigns, and analytics.

4. Yahoo!

Yahoo!, one of the early internet icons, consists of many of its services having a PHP backbone. While Yahoo! has evolved its technology stack over the years to serve over 700 million users, PHP remains a core component of its infrastructure.

5. Canva

Canva, a popular online graphic design tool, primarily uses PHP for its backend development. The platform's features, such as drag-and-drop editing, template libraries, and collaboration tools, are all powered by PHP.

Also read this article : Top 10 ReactJS Development Companies

Reasons Why PHP Is Best For Web Development Project

If you’re still wondering what is PHP used for in web development, we put together a few reasons why you can absolutely count on PHP for your next web development project:

1. Free and Open Source

PHP is open source, absolutely free to use and distribute, hence making it available to any developer regardless of their financial status.

2. Easy to Learn

PHP has a syntax which is relatively simple and pretty outspoken, that is why a person, who starts learning it, can rather easily begin learning it and after that create web applications.

3. Security

PHP can be used to create secure web applications. That is a series of approaches: input validation, sanitization, and the practice of secure coding techniques help evade most of the common vulnerabilities like SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting.

4. Supports All OS

PHP is very portable and runs on many operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and macOS, hence easily fitting into any development environment.

5. Dynamic and Flexible

PHP is a dynamic language that lets developers create or change its code at runtime. This makes it very good at dealing with the most complicated requirements, together with rich dynamic content web applications.

6. Rich Resources

The massive community of developers PHP has amassed over the years means that there are many online resources such as tutorials and documentation.

7. Robust Solutions Using PHP Frameworks

The frameworks Laravel, Symfony, and CodeIgniter provide pre-built components. Hence, it is quite easy to construct robust and scalable web applications with these frameworks and developer best practices.

8. Database Flexibility

PHP supports most databases- be it proprietary or open source, like MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and Oracle.
That means it is highly flexible in terms of the developer who wants to opt for a database that will exactly suit particular needs for the project.

9. Works Well with CMS

Most of the world's top-rated CMS systems like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla have PHP as the fundamental language. That makes website building and management quite easy using these systems.

10. Easy Development Using PHP

PHP is a very good choice for developers because of its adaptability, flexibility, and its active community of developers. It is the first choice for many to develop dynamic and scalable web-based applications, as of today!

Conclusion

PHP might only seem like a thing from years ago, but it actually is still holding the fort for many popular web applications and websites even now.

Building your own projects with the help of PHP is actually quite a wise decision. Hiring PHP developers to build your website or web application is easy today. You can hire such developers from a reputed PHP web development company.

Our own PHP developer services here at Rejoice can connect you with skilled professionals who’ll be ready to solve any challenges you have in an efficient way. Book a free 30 minutes call with our developers.