Top 6 reasons to choose PHP for web development (client’s perspective)

php for web development

PHP, Python, Java, ROR, ASP.Net, ColdFusion, Perl and a lot more languages are available for various kind of web application. But which technology should I choose for my next project ? – is the general question.

In this post i will highlight some of the best reasons for opting PHP for your next project.

PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development.
Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

1. Open Source: Everyone knows PHP is an open source language. But what does it actually mean ? Is it an advantage ? By open source it simply means something available publicly for modification, Yes i think it surely is a great advantage.
   • First advantage is, Everyone around the community can contribute to the development process of the langauge and hence an abundance of feature available in the core language itself.
   • And secondly, a lot of programmers around the globe can review the code and bring out the security breaches, performance issues and other issues it has, hence all known issues is fixed ASAP.
     Checkout this slides to know more about open source

    

2. Available Frameworks/Software: There are fa LOT of open source frameworks/software available in PHP which are used to develop a bespoke website or customized to meet different needs:
   • Frameworks: PHP has many frameworks available which are used according to different needs. This frameworks comes with many features out-of-box (such as authentication system, authorization, pagination, social media integration, validation and a lot more), so it saves the time (and ultimately the development cost !) of re-inventing the wheel everytime we start a project.
     Another advantage of using this frameworks is they provide a better architecture to project (like MVC) which help in increasing performance, clean code, and long-term maintainability.
     Read Comparison of PHP frameworks (Laravel VS codeIgniter) 
   • Content Management System (CMS) : When it comes to CMS, PHP definitely takes an extra edge over any other language. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla covers almost 70% of CMS based websites. With over 140+ million downloads of wordpress, 30+ million downloads of Joomla and 15+ million downloads of Drupal these CMS are extremely popular. All these supports installation of beautiful theme, plugins, widget and much more. Some of the world’s biggest brands and industries rely on WordPress (NASA, TED, CNN, New York post, etc)
   • e-commerce website : PHP has many e-commerce software and eCommerce platform solutions available. From a small shop to a shop with over millions of customers/products can be managed easily using it. WooCommerce and magento takes the lead for e-commerce website. WooCommerce being a plugin to WordPress is good for small to medium size shop and has less development costs. Magento is well suited for large shops and is highly scalable.
   • Customer Relationship Management (CRM), forum, and other softwares : There are many other open source software available which can be customized according to different needs. SugarCRM, vTiger are some CRM system. BuddyPress(WordPress plugin), PHPBB are some open source forums software available .

    

3. Regular Updates: Thanks to the PHP’s active community. They improve the core language regularly to keep it up-to-date with latest technologies trends. Starting from the days of PHP – 4 which used functional programming approach to PHP -5 using object-oriented architecture (and many major changes) to the yet-be-release PHP-7, they are constantly improving it.
   So if you are choosing php, then rest assured you will be using top-notch technology in your software design.
   PHP 7 New features, improvements and benchmark
   
   
4. Performance and security: Performance and security plays a major role in selecting any technology. And PHP community never compromises with it, every new release is tested through different beta phases and released. They constantly improve these two factors.
   With my over 5+ years of experience as a web developer, I think, it has a good performance and handles security better. At the end it depends on developer, how much optimized logic he has used and what all steps he/she takes to make software secure.
   Like for example having a database query inside loop will have a negative effect on performance and the developer need to think of some logics to optimized it, we cannot blame the language for it, right ?
   Or if a developer has not taken any steps to secure from common security issues like CSRF, XSS, SQL injection (and more) it’s not problem with the language, right ?
   So it hugely depends on developers also to take measures for performance and security issues.
5. 3rd party integration : Most websites needs to integrate 3rd party service like payment gateway (ex: paypal), social medias, invoicing service, CRM systems, WebRTC (ex: twilio), Maps, Charts and many other. Fortunately, almost all 3rd party services are compatible with PHP, some also provide SDK and libraries for PHP.
   So, Integrating with 3rd party is easy.
6. PHP usage statistics : Below chart shows PHP is used over 42% of worlds Top Million Sites. (reference)
   

   Usage comparison of web technologies

To conclude, When we look from product owner point of view, I would like to use a language which is up-to-date with latest technology (reliable), efficient, secure, has many features/frameworks available (to cut time and cost). And PHP have pragmatically encapsulated all these in it.

If you are looking for a PHP developer or a team of PHP developers for your project, do contact us, we are a client-friendly team of engineers with expertise in web development services.

php development services

Over to you

Do you agree/disagree with points mentioned here ? have something more to share ? Let us know in the comment below.

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