A PHP developer or PHP development company often finds itself in a dilemma wondering whether their programming language is useful or not.
There are mainly two schools of thought debating over the utility of PHP. One thinks that PHP is a strange language with syntactical disunity. It is not fast and is not formulated around a clear idea of good development practice.
The second school of thought finds PHP to be a dynamic language with a uniform code.
While there are conflicting views about the feasibility of PHP development, 81% of websites are still built on PHP.
Small and large businesses alike, have declared PHP as a program of choice due to its many benefits which are beyond personal preferences.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons
What is PHP
PHP is a programming language designed for all web development purposes. It is built up from the C-programming language, which uses HTML-like tags to write code.
What Are the Uses of PHP?
PHP is can be used to build anything on a web server. It has three main uses
- Server-side scripting
- Desktop application coding
- Command-line scripting
Why Should You Use PHP?
PHP is used and operated on every place the web runs. Some of the popular frameworks that work on PHP are Joomla, Drupal, Magento, ExpressionEngine, and MediaWiki.
There are several PHP frameworks in the market including Symfony, Zend, Laravel, Aura, CakePHP, Yii, and finally CodeIgnitor.
What Are the Benefits of Using PHP?
Now that you’ve understood how PHP works, let’s understand why it is still relevant.
- Open-Source and Affordable
The one thing that developers and IT companies love about PHP is that it is an open-source platform available for free.
There are no patents or licenses required to use PHP for web development. This is because it is categorized under the General Public License.
- Offers Easy Built-In Dynamism
PHP makes HTML rendering and programming easier than any other language. You can easily switch an HTML file to PHP. All you need to do is change the file name like this: file.html to file.php.
You also need to add some dynamism inside like this: <?php and ?> tags.
Working with PHP so simple and anyone can use it without needing an in-depth understanding of the programming language.
- Great Object-Orientation with Package (OOP) Management
PHP is an object-oriented expression language. This feature makes code reusability an easy option. For the uninitiated, a reusable code is written once and later summoned using only function calls, instead of being re-written again.
Code reusability also saves time during the development process, while increasing the efficiency of developers.
The OOP is fully recognized in PHP today. Unlike Java, PHP has a single package manager called the composer. The composer is used in pulling together other maintained and written libraries in PHP.
PHP is backed by a huge developer community. Comprising of developers, programmers, CEOs, and IT professionals, this community is a huge learning source for those who are using PHP.
You can find resources, study material, latest updates, training, and guidance with the help of the developer community.
Developers prefer to use PHP for their web development endeavours since they know the programming language will give them an instant turnaround time and superior performance.
Since customers are fickle with very low attention spans, businesses need a quick, interactive, and engaging website to capture their customers’ interests.
PHP makes your website highly responsive due to its high-speed data processing features. It supports integration with external tools, extensions, and content management systems.
- Excellent Online Documentation and Maintenance
PHP documentation is undoubtedly the best on the web. Every function and call is meticulously documented with hundreds of examples to study from.
The code is transparent, which saves the developer’s time to understand it. Due to its easy readability, PHP code can be easily modified.
- Plenty of Interactive Features
PHP packs many interactive sets of features that enable brands to engage with the website visitors in a manner that is not possible to achieve using HTML.
Developers can design intuitive shopping carts that recommend products and save past orders or simple email forms. You can also build interactive forums and messaging systems with PHP.
Summing Up
PHP development has grown exponentially in the past decade with developers preferring to use the programming language for most of their web development projects.
Being an open-source framework, PHP offers cost-efficiency; whereas its reusable syntax saves time and allows timely delivery of projects.
Due to these obvious advantages, the relevance of PHP will not be diminishing anytime soon.
