The popularity of PHP as one of the most efficient programming languages is backed by the seamless integration of the language with prevalent CMSes like Drupal and WordPress. It is even opted by modern app developers using frameworks like Laravel and Symfony. However, the rise of other programming languages has sidelined the importance of PHP. The question that often comes to mind is – is PHP still relevant for app developers?

The Primary Reasons for the widespread popularity of PHP

PHP, also known as Hypertext Preprocessor, is an excellent server-side language, powering almost 80% of all websites. In fact, it is the backbone for well-known platforms such as Facebook and WordPress. But, newcomers in the developer industry still question its importance. That is mainly due to the rise of other languages and their usage too. 

However, PHP is still considered one of the most proficient web development languages. Take a look at the reasons –

• Open-source

PHP is an open-source language, which means that it is available for free. Developers do not have to invest anything to use this language. Moreover, installing it is easy, and PHP comes with access to different frameworks such as Symfony and Laravel. Using PHP definitely cuts down costs for web development companies. 

• Easy learning curve

The popularity of PHP is mainly due to the fact that it is easy to learn and use. Even without prior expertise or extensive knowledge of the language, one can master it. The simple syntax coupled with an easy learning grade makes it possible for the newcomers to excel in the language.

• Security

One of the most crucial aspects of web development is the security of the application or the website. Even though PHP doesn’t boast of extreme security measures, it still offers the same level of security as other programming languages do. In fact, the extensive community support ensures developers access to different tools and practices to combat cyberthreats. 

When is PHP used for programming?

There are various instances where PHP is the right choice for website or app development. Take a look at these circumstances –

• When you want the app or site to be available to the public as soon as possible

Do you want the application to be released quickly in the market? In that case, using PHP as the programming language is an ideal option. That is because PHP is easy to use and delivers fast results. Developers can use this programming language to quickly develop apps or websites. Besides, the vast array of ready-made libraries and prevalent frameworks is an impressive advantage for PHP. 

• When application stability is a priority

The active usage of PHP for more than two decades and constant upgrades makes it a stable programming language. The in-built memory feature of PHP aids in decreasing workload and loading time. That, in turn, lends stability to the application or website. 

• When optimizing the app or website for SEO is crucial

In order to gain success in the online landscape, the website or app must be easy to find. In that case, SEO optimization is of utter importance. PHP contains clean HTML, which is highly favored by search engine crawlers. In fact, it is the sites that use PHP that has gained immense traffic on the web. 

Conclusion

The wide range of benefits that PHP offers make it one of the most efficient programming languages. No wonder web developers prefer this language. Constant improvements and excellent community support make it an ideal choice for professionals in the web technology sector. However, the programming language you choose for modern app development depends entirely on the needs of the project. PHP is ideally dominating the whole web technology. The constant modifications and improvements in the programming language make it even more demanding, competitive, and efficient and making it the right choice for building applications.

So what are you thinking? Consult GoodWorkLabs and solve all your queries with a consultation call with our team. GoodWorkLabs is based out of Bangalore and Kolkata, India, and San Francisco, USA. The company has an experienced set of team that will work on your application and will deliver the best solution to you.  Contact us now!

PHP is one of the most popular languages in the world, used by most websites thanks to the popularity of content management systems such as WordPress or Drupal. Recently though, JavaScript-based Node.js has seen popularity but PHP is often considered more innovative and suitable for cutting-edge projects. 

But is PHP still the right choice for modern app development? 

In fact, the moment web developers from any software development agency think of web development, they have this common name in their mind, – PHP.

While many of the newcomers in the industry might doubt its efficiency, others consider the language to be the basis of web development.

Let’s read more about it – 

PHP is used when you want a faster release of your product in the market 

It’s a good idea to release fast for many reasons, including the ability to save a lot of costs when the endeavour doesn’t work out. A quick start may also lead to finding new business models you previously have not even considered. If your business idea also calls for a web app, PHP is a perfect choice. When it comes to time-to-market, PHP excels because of how quickly you can develop with it. The credit goes to the two most popular PHP frameworks Symfony and Laravel and an incredible choice of ready-made dedicated libraries that comprise their ecosystems.

PHP is also the first choice when you want to make your site SEO optimized as a priority

Online stores and other eCommerce projects are the best examples of sites that need to rank well in order to perform well. If we want our web app to rank high for various keywords in popular search engines, we need to take that into consideration during development. Search engine robots favour clean HTML because it is much easier to crawl and read. And outputting such code is the very reason PHP was created in the first place. 

As a matter of fact, every time you arrive at a text-rich website that ranks high on Google, there is a very good chance it was written in PHP. 

PHP also ensures application stability

PHP is a very stable solution as it is being actively used and developed for well over two decades. Symfony and Laravel are also still being improved in response to the latest technological trends and expectations of developers. PHP also employs its inbuilt memory which reduces both the loading time and workload. And owing to this reason, the processing ability of this programming language becomes immensely high. It works as a two-way process benefiting both the app development companies and their clients.

PHP provides great support for REST API 

All the major PHP frameworks provide great support for REST API. The Symfony framework even offers a whole platform dedicated to the development of APIs, both REST and GraphQL. It’s called API Platform and it makes it possible to quickly create APIs only by adding the business logic. 

API Platform automates a lot of typical tasks, making the whole API development process amazingly efficient. We get a full documentation of our API in OpenAPI/Swagger format to boot. Since the documentation is created and updated automatically, API users don’t ever have to worry if it’s up-to-date. In addition, the API Platform enforces a very stable structure of responses.

Conclusion

PHP is ideally dominating the whole web technology. The constant modifications and improvements in the programming language make it even more demanding, competitive, and efficient and making it the right choice for building applications.

So what are you thinking? Consult GoodWorkLabs and solve all your queries with a consultation call with our team. GoodWorkLabs is based out of Bangalore and Kolkata, India, and San Francisco, USA. The company has an experienced set of team that will work on your application and will deliver the best solution to you.  Contact us now!

For a digital business to succeed, one needs a strong web presence, meaning a functional, faster loading, and user-friendly website. And such a website comes with picking the correct programming language. In fact, the moment web developers from any software development agency think of web development, they have this common name in their mind, – PHP.

While many of the newcomers in the industry might doubt its efficiency, others consider the language to be the basis of web development.

But is it true?

Is PHP still relevant in 2022?

Let’s find out in detail!

The use of PHP

PHP, being the most popular programming language, was first introduced to serve as a web visitor counter. But with the passing years, the scripting language has been modified dynamically with new added features and updates. It has gradually become the basis of web and app development and a top favorite of e-commerce website developers.

With this scripting programming language, web and mobile app development companies in Bangalore write HTML codes, develop API and CRM systems, and generate XLS, XML, and CSV files. And the best part is that PHP is well-compatible with every web browser and platform. The most advanced PHP version has double-layer security, and optimal loading speed, and is best known for its low maintenance and high-quality performance.

Benefits of using PHP programming language

PHP comes with endless advantages, and due to this reason, most web and app development companies use this programming language to develop websites, apps, and web apps. Here is a list of the top-notch advantage:

Flexible Open source tool

Developing a website or app in PHP is totally free. Moreover, the programming language works amazingly with several databases such as PostgreSQL, and Apache. The foremost reason why the language is widely popular among the developers is that it’s easy to learn, compatible with multiple OS, including Linux, Unix, Solaris, etc., and very flexible to adapt to changes and alterations in an ongoing or a complete project.

Scalability

Do you know that PHP employs its inbuilt memory? It, in turn, reduces both the loading time and workload. And owing to this reason, the processing ability of this programming language becomes immensely high. It works as a two-way process benefiting both the app development companies and their clients. To put it simply, the companies can accomplish the project faster, whereas the clients can receive it without any delay.

Versatility

Websites that are developed with PHP programming language are SEO-friendly, which is a roundabout way that is beneficial for your business’s marketing purposes.

In fact, the scripting programming language is capable of developing any website and app in 2022. Be it simple WordPress sites, website landing pages, or web apps like Facebook, anything can be framed conveniently with PHP.

Security

Even if PHP is an open-source tool, many believe it to be not secure. However, any programming language is vulnerable to threats. The safety and security totally rely on the developers and the agile software development scrum he uses. And as mentioned earlier, the latest version of this scripting language is way more secure and encrypted.

PHP in 2023 relevance Conclusion 

Without a doubt, PHP is massively dominating the whole web technology. The constant modifications and improvements in the programming language make it even more demanding, competitive, and efficient. Most machine learning companies in Bangalore are continually upgrading the scripting language, its functionality, and performance, creating tools to support it, adding libraries, directories, and so on! So, unquestionably, PHP is still in the game in 2022, and probably there will be no such change in the coming years.

So what are you thinking? Consult GoodWorkLabs and solve all your queries with a consultation call with our team. GoodWorkLabs is based out of Bangalore and Kolkata, India, and San Francisco, USA. The company has an experienced set of team that will work on your application and will deliver the best solution to you.  Contact us now!

Facebook’s Association With PHP

According to the history described on the Wikipedia page for Facebook, Zuckerberg wrote the initial code for Facebook in October 2003.

Consider what other web technologies might be considered, and whether they existed in 2003:

• Ruby existed, but no Rails yet (1.0 was introduced July 2004).

• Java 1.4 with JSF 1.x or Spring 1.0.

• Perl 5.8, but no Catalyst framework (it was introduced February 2005).

• Python existed, but no Django framework (it was introduced July 2005).

• The term Ajax for web programming was coined in 2005, but the use of asynchronous XML requests was still nonstandard, too early to be used with for broad browser compatibility.

• C# 1.0 and .NET 1.1 (C# 2.0 was introduced June 2006).

• JavaScript existed, but no Node.js (it was developed in 2009) and no jQuery (it was introduced August 2006).

• Amazon EC2 was released in August 2006.

• Heroku was founded in 2007.

• Go first appeared publicly in 2009.

The point is that Facebook’s choice of PHP was perfectly reasonable for the time it was created.

And Why Facebook Has Not Done Away With PHP?

The reason Facebook hasn’t migrated away from PHP is because Facebook’s engineers have managed to work around many of its flaws through a combination of patches at all levels of the stack and excellent internal discipline via code convention and style. The worst attributes of the language have been avoided and coding style has been rigidly enforced through a fairly tight culture of code review.  Engineering management has never had to take a strong hand here. This arose largely due to key internal technical leaders just sort of pushing everyone else along.

There is also a lot of industry precedent indicating that re-writing an entire codebase in another language is usually one of the worst things you can do, so at all levels there is a reluctance to do that.  The preferred strategy is to write new components in a decoupled manner using a better language of choice (C++, python, Erlang, Java, etc).

This is easily facilitated by Facebook’s early development of thrift, an efficient multi-language RPC framework.  This also helps avoid the worst effects of PHP: it can be totally avoided in subcomponents where the language is grossly-unsuitable.  The broad effect is that the overall codebase slowly evolves away from depending as heavily on PHP, with the components that are still in PHP being written in tightly-controlled, disciplined ways by veteran members of the staff.

The flavor of PHP used at Facebook, Hack, is very far removed from what we typically think of when we picture PHP. In almost every way it has been ahead of JavaScript. It had static typing, generators, async/await, tuples, anonymous functions, classes, and XHP for a long time, often years before they were available in Node. As a result the Hack codebase is very close in spirit to a modern JS application.

So, to summarize it, Facebook has internally upgraded features of PHP by using its own unique methodologies. Hack, their flavor of PHP is far better than most of the other options and hence they have stuck with it, and are likely to in the near future as well.

MVC, short for Model View Controller is a design pattern governs the fundamental law that application logic should be separate from presentation. Several PHP developers, experienced and emerging, have been eager about integrating MVC into their development script but the information across the web is limited and those that exist use terms and glossary that would be hard to understand for a beginner. Most tutorials would start with business logics without actually defining design pattern basics.

MVC was first described as design patterns to be used with Smalltalk by Trygve Reenskaug back in 1979. His paper “Applications Programming in Smalltalk-80: How to use Model View Controller” laid the ground for all future MVC architectures. In simple words, MVC is just a simpler way of separating application logic from the display. The basic idea with MVC is to separate applications into 3 parts, referred as Model, View and Controller. The Controller has direct associations with the View and the Model and so does View over the model. However, the Model lays inferred association over the View and subsequently over Controller. Inferred associations can be distinguished as associations that might seem feasible from the user’s point of view, but not the actual software design.

How does the interaction take place?

1. Users interact with “View” – submitting forms or clicking links
2. Controller handles user input by transferring the information to Model
3. Model in turn receives these information and add to the database to update itself
4. The View therein checks the update and responds necessarily
5. The View waits for the next interaction from user

MVC might seem to be a great solution for starters. However, separating logic from the display isn’t a new concept. With MVC, it is just a more streamlines process. Simpler layouts and code presentations make applications maintainable.

Business Logic

A much used term, Business Logic implies the calculation of logical processes in an application. For a simple calendar, the Business Logic will be to identify the day, date, month, etc.

Templates

Several MVC frameworks use templates to enforce DRY, facilitating easy code reuse without rewriting. However, a caution for new developers would be that some templates carry complicated syntax and you wouldn’t want learning a whole new language. It would be better to grab them before staring the development.

DRY

One of the most crucial implementations of MVC architecture is DRY or the “Don’t Repeat Yourself” philosophy. DRY is also used by Ruby on Rails allowing the developer to code once and reuse it often. The principles governing DRY suggest that changing a single element doesn’t necessarily interfere with unrelated elements. For someone conversant with Ruby on Rails, the DRY principle would be easier to understand.

Convention over Configuration

A design paradigm that aims to remove the quantity of decision making, Convention over Configuration is achieved by setting up adequate frameworks for each convention. It gets pretty easier doing the minor changes here and there.

MVC is a popular method of generating clean, powerful, and scalable and fast coding in the least time and effort. For developers, it would be worth experimenting with a few frameworks before sticking with the best.