Why Has PHP Emerged as One of The Best-suited Methods for Efficient Web Development?

Introduction

Nowadays, most businesses have their websites to build their brand image and appear more professional and authentic. Customized software development firms are found to continue to favor PHP for web development.

What is PHP?

PHP, which stands for "Hypertext Preprocessor," is an open-source scripting language that web developers widely use for the development of static and dynamic web pages and applications. Its ability to interact with database systems such as MySQL and Oracle is one of the main reasons for its popularity. Furthermore, because it is a server-side scripting language, it can be easily embedded within HTML code.

It has been a popular market choice for the last 25 years, with several additional features and regular upgrades. This article will discuss why software development firms prefer PHP for web development and how it outperforms other available technologies.

Benefits Of Choosing PHP For Web Development

PHP is an Open-Source Language

Being an open-source language, downloading and installing PHP is free. It includes zero cost. Moreover, PHP frameworks like Laravel, Symfony, Yii 2, Zend and CakePHP, are also free and have open access for the developers. Web developers can notably reduce the time for development by taking advantage of these frameworks.

This helps the PHP development companies control their budget and the cost of the web development projects.

PHP is Easy to Learn and Understand

PHP has a simple syntactic structure, making PHP web development easy to master. The command functions are also relatively less complicated than the other technologies. Anyone new to web development can learn the basic syntax of PHP very fast, sometimes even in months, and can start with creating single PHP files. This is one of the significant reasons developers prefer PHP for web development.

Strong Community Support for the PHP Development Companies

Since PHP is an old technology, it has successfully established a widespread and loyal community all around the globe. Several technical documentation, FAQs, syntax elaborations, tutorials, and many others help the developers master PHP very easily. In case of critical issues, the developers get considerable support in fixing the bugs in no time.

PHP is Fast and Secured

The newer versions of PHP are swift and compete well with other technologies on the market. It also has its own memory. All businesses want their websites to be fast and secure. PHP web development enables this. The large community of PHP developers makes it very easy to fix bugs and other critical issues, making web pages more robust and less vulnerable.

PHP's Embedding Ability

Nowadays, all web pages are designed to be responsive to all screen sizes. HTML5 is essential in the creation of these responsive website designs. This is where PHP tends to come into its own as a game-changer. PHP can then be used to create code that could be easily inserted into an HTML codebase. Because of this feature of PHP, PHP development companies save a great deal of time and resources.

It is Flexible and Versatile

PHP is platform-independent. This means PHP can be executed on multiple platforms or systems like Windows, macOS, Linux, etc. PHP supports most web browsers and thus, can easily be deployed. In addition to HTTP, POP3, LDAP COM, LDAP, the software supports some more common protocols. It is highly versatile.

PHP is Tried and Tested

Since PHP has been commonly used for so many years, it has been coded and implemented for a wide range of real-world scenarios. Consequently, the bugs have been detected and, for the most part, fixed.PHP is thus comparatively more stable than the newer languages and hence, more trustworthy. With passing time, many frameworks such as Laravel have been developed, which has made PHP web development more efficient and straightforward.

Build CMS(Content Management System) With the Help Of PHP

The emerging developments in adaptive content have resulted in CMS customized products, which have become an essential strategic requirement for enterprises. Content management operations such as creating new content, editing, or deleting pre-existing content can now be performed by business owners with little technical knowledge. The combined contributions of PHP and MySQL have made this possible. The code of the websites can now be easily customized and integrated without any issues.

PHP Can Easily Interact With Databases

PHP was one of the first server-side scripting languages that could be easily integrated into HTML code. PHP web development is extremely simple for developers because PHP can easily connect to database systems. IT works well with databases such as MySQL, Oracle, and others. The advantage of this is that developers can choose which database is suitable for their application.

MS-SQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and other database management systems compatible with PHP are reasonable alternatives. Furthermore, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Redis, as well as other non-relational databases can all be used with PHP.

Standard Library Support

Yes, a good programming language requires the support of a standard library. It can streamline the coding process and accelerate the software development system. These standard libraries support HTTP fetching, URL parsing, and database drivers. Despite the library's incoherence, the community continues to work on it.

Keeps the Audience Engaged With the Websites

Any site visitor who waits longer than 3 to 4 seconds for a page to load will leave. To maintain traffic, it is critical to keep the audience engaged with the sites on the internet. PHP includes a JIT (Just In Time) Engine that compiles PHP code into machine code. This cuts down the page loading time and keeps the audience interested.

Lesser Hosting Charges

The LAMP stack is the most prevalent operation circumstance for a PHP webpage. It denotes that a website is hosted on a Linux system with an Apache HTTP web server and MySQL as the database. Every one of these elements is free, as well as the stack has been thoroughly tested, suggesting a reduction in development time and costs. Thus, the hosting prices required for PHP web development are much cheaper.

PHP Web Development Has High Scalability

Using PHP, you can write small code and effortlessly embed everything within the HTML codebase. PHP includes several tools, resources, and frameworks that can be used to scale up these small web applications at any time. These freely available frameworks can easily replace pre-existing versions of web pages, allowing for the creation of massive and complicated web pages.

Easily Compatible With Multiple Cloud Services

Nowadays, many applications utilize Google Cloud Platform(GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) for different ideas. Websites developed by PHP development companies are easily compatible with these cloud services.

A PHP web application can be deployed on a cloud platform and benefit from increased scalability, application performance, and other features. Furthermore, because other computer programming languages do not have a stranglehold in the context of cloud computing, PHP has earned its spot in such deployments.

Major Domains Of PHP Web Development

PHP is widely used in the following domains:

• ECommerce Web Applications
• Flash features are now being developed
• Image processing
• Trend analysis and Graphical presentation of Data
• CMS(Content Management System)
• Encryption Of Data
• PHP can manage forms, which means it can gather data and information, help in saving data to a file, send data via emails, as well as return data to the user
• PHP allows you to add, delete, and modify database components
• PHP performs system functions, which means it can generate, open, read, write, and close files on any system
• Connecting the web applications with databases
• Used to accept the cookies and set new cookie variables
• Keep a record of the number of site visitors
• Using PHP, you can restrain users from accessing some web pages
• Dynamic web application development
  

Let's Decode Some Facts and Figures Related to PHP Web Development

1. PHP is the 4th most popular amongst all the frameworks in India.
2. According to W3Tech, around 78.9% of the websites with a known server-side programming language uses PHP for web development.
3. Did you know that the original name of PHP was "Personal Home Page"?
4. More than 244 million websites are designed using PHP. Undoubtedly, it has emerged as one of the best-suited methods for efficient web development.
5. The latest stable version of PHP is PHP 7.4, which was released on 28th November 2019.
   

Top 3 Issues of Using PHP for Web Development And How to Overcome Them?

"PHP is dead," you've probably heard it at least once. It's completely untrue. However, PHP has some drawbacks that need to be addressed. Let's know how to overcome these drawbacks. Before hiring any PHP development companies, you should be well acquainted with them.

Security Issues

PHP, as you may know, is an open-source programming language. As a result, its ASCII text file is publicly available. Anyone can take a look at it without difficulty. Any hacker can take advantage of your website's code flaws and commit fraud.

Solution

Inexperienced coders are the ones who write flawed code and leave websites vulnerable. You won't have to worry about security if you hire experienced PHP development companies to develop your company's products.

Standard Library Support is Still Under Development

If your website necessitates Machine Learning algorithms, PHP may not be the best option in such scenarios. TensorFlow, Scikit-learn, Theano, and Keras, all based on Python Programming Language, on the other hand, provide extensive support for developing machine learning-based website pages. Unfortunately, PHP can't compete with Python in this essential criterion because it can't offer solutions that are as quick and efficient.

Solution

After years of research, machine learning frameworks have been introduced for PHP developers. The PHP framework libraries, namely Rubix ML and PHP ML, are finally in the market after releasing PHP 7.2 to support your ML requirements. They are seen to provide high performance.

Many Speculate That The Future Of PHP Seems Threatened

The PHP development community is currently extensive and powerful. On the other hand, experts predict that the situation will change in the future.

To be fair, that number is decreasing. In November 2017, W3Techs reported that PHP was the server-side language of choice for 80.1 percent of websites. In June 2018, that figure had dropped to 79.6%.

The availability of simpler programming languages for web development is a major factor in this situation. New programmers nowadays prefer to learn Python or MERN for developing web pages.

Solution

It will take a long time for the statistics to decline in any significant way. According to Kinsta, it will take more than 25 years before the PHP user base drops to 50%. So, don't worry. Though the numbers are declining, PHP development companies will continue to be one of the most popular options in the upcoming days.

Final Thoughts

By now, you know both the advantages and disadvantages of using PHP for web development. It's time to conclude why you should prefer PHP for your business.

• The current PHP developer community is mighty and influential. You can conveniently find a team of designers and developers to create the product you require.
• PHP is now faster than it has ever been. Compared to other web development technologies such as Python, it provides significantly faster page load time and website performance.
• PHP is an open-source programming language, which reduces the project's cost. It will be easier for you all to meet the budget's overheads.
• For any business, time is crucial. PHP is a good option if you need your product to be developed quickly. It is exceptionally well documented, and numerous tutorials and community support groups are available. The developers are capable of completing the assigned project quickly.
• Because you've already read about PHP's flexibility, you're aware that it could be readily incorporated with various cloud services and web development technologies. As a result, development teams will always have more viable alternatives while developing your product.
  

PHP software developers must still devote additional time and resources to coding the web application in PHP. They need to use the resources provided by various frameworks, libraries, and content management systems to reduce development time significantly. Simply put, PHP is one of the proficient scripting languages for constructing feature-rich websites while requiring less time and expense from developers.

Having chosen PHP for website design and development services will unquestionably provide you with successful performance when developing a website for your company.