PHP as a server-side web development language has evolved from the small open-source project. It was created in 1995 by Rasmus Lerdorf who wrote a few CGI programs and managed to make them work with web forms and databases. He hasn’t aimed to create a new programming language but it turned to become among one of the biggest open-source languages. Anyone can make a contribution to the new release including task deployment, testing, documentation, and sources.
Thanks to its accessibility, PHP has gained popularity among a huge number of developers. It might be a common choice for newcomers, as its learning curve is much easier in comparison with others.
The PHP community has various open-source free libraries, tools and extensions. For example MySQL Extension, it allows developers to create PHP apps that interact with the database while enabling improved statement and transaction support.
In the light of ASP vs PHP comparison, the PHP developers deal with the other type of code – interpreted one that is completely written in C. It allows excellent customization nevertheless that might be the cause for some bugs and poor coding.
Since this server-side language was initially released for web development, it is efficient in communicating and accessing most types of databases. Due to its adaptability and flexibility, developers are not limited in their choice. Moreover, PHP can have support for other services covering different protocols like POP3, HTTP, IMAP, LDAP, etc.
Consequently, being open-sourced turned out to be a great solution for the PHP web development community. They have gained the biggest market share and keep on the constant improvements and regular releases.
The first reason why PHP is good for web development is that this programming language has been initially presented as a web scripting language. It is greatly supported and improved by its own community that consists of more than 5 million PHP developers. The open-source programming language is quite popular among newcomers and has gained the biggest market share. Its supportive community keeps on growing for more than 25 years.
Working with open source has its own advantages and disadvantages. In fact, this language is easy to learn, compatible with different servers, and suitable for various web applications. Another distinction of PHP development is the interpreted code. This type of code is usually executed on the server, later generated into HTML, and only then sent to the user side. Accordingly, the execution time is longer and might get some errors with importing heavy files and lead to slower performance compared to other languages.
On the other side, PHP web development is often chosen for increased scalability. This is accomplished by adding more servers. The overall workload will be distributed between them and can handle more user requests. This approach relies upon the horizontal scalability that differs PHP from ASP.NET.
Having a number of in-built security features, PHP is still considered less secure compared with other web-server programming languages. While obtaining more flexibility in writing the code, engineers have more responsibilities to secure it and can’t rely only on the in-build tools.
Lower development and maintenance cost is usually acknowledged as a great benefit. PHP developers have access to all the tools and libraries without any additional fees. Moreover, developers can choose among the different hosting services and have the opportunity to pay less.
This adaptable and flexible programming language can easily meet the primary needs of web development. However, the companies need to outline their needs at first and make sure it corresponds to the set requirements and final goals.
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