Hello everybody,
To kick off the first-ever technical article, let’s discuss PHP, one of the oldest languages that still and will be relevant in the next 10 or 20 years.
What is PHP language?
PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development
Wikipedia
A really popular language for creating websites. Not only so, PHP has been presented in Backend development (such as APIs) for years.
PHP offers easy syntaxes (C/C++ alike), great functions, and libraries for web development. Not only that, we can use either functional programming or object-oriented programming (OOP).
People can easily learn PHP within a day for some basic stuff.
Why PHP in 2024?
As of now (July 13th, 2024). The latest stable PHP version is 8.3 and the pre-release version is 8.4-alpha1.
Back in the day, when PHP had a big jump from PHP 5.6 to 7.0, it was a tremendous improvement: the speed, the engine, the practices,…
And from PHP 7.4 to 8.0, there were big performance & language improvements too.
The PHP community & contributors will always be big
We have seen a lot of criticism regarding PHP performance, spaghetti code,… for years. Don’t blame the language, it isn’t the language’s fault (don’t hate the game, hate the playa).
Fun fact: as of now, 60% of websites in the world are using PHP. There are some big names that love PHP too: Facebook, Slack (and more).
Improvements
Through the years, PHP has improved:
- Type systems: PHP offers both flexible and strictly-typed (and it’s still improving in every version)
- The speed: every major or minor version always has a performance boost
- Security: yes, the top priority of PHP
- And so much more (new functions, deprecating old/out-of-date functions or libraries,…)
Popular frameworks
This is a big plus when we decide to use PHP. There are many large frameworks in PHP and it’s enterprise-ready!
There are some notable frameworks below
Laravel
Laravel is the most famous framework in PHP.
Laravel is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. We’ve already laid the foundation — freeing you to create without sweating the small things.
Laravel
Laravel has included a bunch of useful stuff thus we only need to focus to work on the ideas and make it come to life.
Symfony
Symfony is another famous framework in the PHP world.
Symfony is a set of reusable PHP components and a PHP framework to build web applications, APIs, microservices and web services.
Symfony
Using Symfony, you can set up your project in your own way, with your own structure, and design patterns,…
Magento
Magento is an e-commerce framework/platform to help us quickly scaffold a new e-commerce website.
Magento offers an open-sourced version (maintained by the community).
PHP 2024 helps you to iterate faster
By using PHP together with a popular framework, we can iterate faster, and deliver values quicker.
Other perks of using PHP in 2024
- Deploying a PHP application is ridiculously easy.
- Serverless ready.
Conclusion
Well, that’s it guys.
PHP is a cool language that would bring you the joy of creating websites or performant backend systems.
Until next time!
