Briefly about PHP programming language

 

PHP is a server-side scripting programming language created mainly for server-side web development. PHP is primarily used for small and middle sized projects as well as for box solutions. Being fluent and providing high coding speed, PHP also offers a simple way to make dynamic web pages, websites, and web applications.

However, there are examples of large and famous PHP development projects such as Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Tumblr, MailChimp, and many others. There we should note that if they have to choose a programming language for the projects now, they would likely to stay on PHP as it doesn’t suit well for high-scalable solutions.

As any language, PHP had its ups and downs. Despite some talks that PHP had been becoming an anti-trend in the programming world, the language was improved with the launch of a new 7th version. Also now it continues to be enhanced saving all strong and eliminating weak points.

Here at Smartym we know the potential of PHP and provide PHP development services. In this post, we will speak about benefits of the language and kinds of projects it suits for.

 

PHP development benefits

 

1. Performance

PHP has higher performance rating compared to other languages for custom web app development. Coding in PHP is fast, here it definitely beats Java. Surely, there are other rapid programming languages for web projects such as Python and Ruby, but PHP is more popular and convenient. And it’s quickly growing providing better operating standards every day.

What concerns custom web app development, PHP high speed is great for building minimum viable products (MVPs) to save money and test the app idea. The language offers all abilities for rapid application development such as building blocks, design structure, involving PHP frameworks like Symfony, Laravel, Yii, Zend, etc. So, if you have a small/middle sized web project and need to quickly launch it, PHP is a good option.
2. PHP improvements

We’ve already mentioned PHP 7.0 version released not so long ago and providing enhanced capabilities for web developers. They involve more quick code execution, enhanced memory usage, new interoperability features, higher security level, as well as better performance due to refactored Zend Engine.
3. Easy to code, read, edit

PHP is a rather simple programming language comparing to many others (Java, Python, etc.). In most cases, there are a lot of variants to write something or solve some problem. Also, it is easy to edit as users can fastly scan PHP documents to find and change the code in some place of it, which is obviously an advantage for PHP web app developers.

Another reason of why PHP is loved by software engineers is that it’s clean, fluent, and well-structure, so it’s easy to read and conceive while a lot of other languages are rather complex at this point.
4. Open source

Another benefit of PHP programming language is that it’s completely free under PHP General Public License. Moreover, most PHP “associatives” such as MySQL, Apache Server and others are also freely available. Thus, PHP is a cost-efficient solution.
5. PHP strong community

A great benefit of PHP is a large community of software engineers. Here developers can easily find code scripts, options to write some program, code lines, or solve some problem, get insight in useful discussions, and ask for help if needed.

This especially beneficial for beginners in custom web app development. One of the primary goals of PHP community is to assist each other as well as to develop and improve the language.
6. Flexible web development

Interoperability is obviously important in building web apps as it ensures flexibility of employing multiple tools. For example, you can borrow some features from other libraries if you need, use various frameworks, and so on.

One of the advantages of PHP web application development is that programmers have access to all PHP framework (Symfony, Lavarel, etc.) packages and components.
7. Suitable for building IoT solutions

With the release of a new version, it has become possible for PHP to run several tasks in the script simultaneously. That is because PHP 7.0 was named the first step to asynchronous programming. And this is one of the votes for PHP to be used in developing IoT solutions. Also, the language has a dynamic nature and provides high speed of coding (as we’ve mentioned above).

One should note that many IoT platforms realise the potential of PHP for creating IoT software and offer PHP SDKs, enable engineers to develop apps using GPS data, generate code snippets in PHP, etc.  
8. Extensions and abilities

Code written on PHP can be completely embedded into HTML or HTML 5 code. Also, software engineers can combine PHP code with multiple web template systems, frameworks, and CMSs (content management systems). PHP enables programmers to easily write custom extensions in C and C++.
9. PHP developers availability and cost

PHP is a popular language choice of programming world beginners, as it has always been. It’s not a Python, where it’s more challenging to find required specialists for the project as it’s more rare direction.

Also, PHP developers cost less than, for example, Java ones, it’s just a fact. Especially it concerns wages of junior and middle-level software engineers. However, if to compare wages of senior levels, the cost difference won’t be so noticeable.

We provide PHP development services and deliver quality results. We have a high expertise in PHP dev, but perhaps the most notable PHP project we built is the platform for event management and promotion.

Read about its development, tools, working stages, etc., in the portfolio. For web app development we also use Java, so in case you need to define the best tools for the project, our specialists will always help you and provide with a consultation.