The hullabaloo against WordPress Gutenberg editor blocks being made of JavaScript and not PHP made everyone think “Is the reign of PHP over?” Well, No! At Least that is what the statistics say. W3Techs ran a report that suggests “PHP is used by 79% of all the websites with a known server-side programming language”. That is 8/10 website that you know! So, our guess is PHP is here to stay.

PHP trends over the last one years have shown a little decrease though, somewhere around 1%. But, no. of PHP developers hasn’t shown any decrease whatsoever. So, developers are, in fact, learning the language and are keen to develop PHP based applications.

Usage of PHP for websites

According to an article by TechRepublic, PHP is still in the “7 programming languages that every developer should learn in 2018” list. So, why is it so that we constantly hear people say that PHP is dead? Let’s take a look at few myths regarding PHP.

Why is there a myth that the time of PHP is up?

PHP doesn’t scale and PHP is slow. These are the most discussed ones. Really? Facebook, Wikipedia, Slack, and WordPress, are all developed using PHP.

Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website and Facebook has over 2.38 billion monthly active users as of 2019. Doesn’t scale? Come again.

And with the latest PHP versions, PHP is faster than ever. According to hackr.io, PHP 7 is three times faster than Python. Take that! But, if you are not a developer, these stats won’t matter to you. So, let’s see why choosing PHP as your tech stack doesn’t mean disaster, as you were told.

PHP business elements: Why developing enterprise applications in PHP?

[1] Tons of developers: As I mentioned previously, 8 out of 10 websites still runs on PHP. This means there are ample developers that know how to code in PHP, both experienced and beginners. This also translates to easy hiring. Out of the applications, Binaryfolks receives, more than 80% of the applicants have some experience in PHP.

[2] Low development costs: PHP has been around since forever. The fact that PHP is an open-source server-side programming language, helps reduce the cost. Also, the developers have the option to choose from several PHP frameworks and can also avail tools and features provided by these open source PHP frameworks.

With PHP, you can churn a decent software application in less than $15K!

[3] Faster time to market: The tools, features and the code snippets that the open-source PHP frameworks provide helps accelerate the application development. PHP has a huge library of open-source packages (https://packagist.org/) that can be used across multiple frameworks, thus saving a hefty amount of development time.

Also, the code generation feature by certain PHP frameworks helps automatically generate code based on settings and parameters that the developers choose, again, saving time!

[4] Huge community support: Because we all struggle with bugs at times. With PHP being around for so long, there is a huge community of PHP developers who are ready to provide instant support, unlike many other programming languages.

[5] Scalability: Scalability is the first thing that pops up when we talk about application development ( For ex: Enterprise Software (e.g. ERP) development). You have to make provisions for the ERP to handle an increasing amount of load or in simple terms ability to accommodate growth.

PHP applications are made scalable by adding more servers to a group of servers. The workload between the servers is distributed by load balancers.

[6] Security: PHP has a bad name when it comes to application security. But contrary to popular belief, PHP rarely has any in-built security flaws. PHP’s lack of security is mostly because of the developers who implement the language.

But, PHP 7 came out with security upgradations that truly revamped the security protocol of the language. Some security best practices in PHP is to update it on a regular basis, using htmlspecialchars to avoid cross-site scripting, using ORM like doctrine or eloquent to minimize SQL injection attacks, etc.

PHP is still a top choice if you are looking to develop an eCommerce website or a custom CMS. Also, PHP is much preferred for API development. PHP, in fact, is all set to enter a renaissance. PHP 7.1 seems a completely new language with new and improved features. I’m sure that it is going to further evolve and come out stronger and better. The greatness of PHP is that, it is open source. That means full code visibility and a large community of developers resulting in new ideas, quicker development, and troubleshooting.

You might not like PHP, but calling it dead is a bit too extreme. Just because the focus of a group of developers is on one specific language doesn’t mean all other languages are dead or dying. Like the latest trend of proclaiming celebrities dead in 2018 subsided, I hope “PHP is dead” also subsides in 2019! Amen!