Advantages of PHP
Among the developers, there are dissonant opinions on the robustness and the convenience to use PHP to develop websites and web applications, especially if advanced.
Given that no programming language is the absolute best and each of them has their own advantages, some of them are more suitable than others for certain types of applications. PHP is useful and suitable for many web applications, as well as being within reach of those who are taking the first steps in web development.
Let’s look at the main advantages of PHP.
Simplicity of learning PHP
PHP is one of the easiest languages to learn among the back-end technologies. Those who are already familiar with the languages such as C or Java will find PHP syntax to be very familiar. Even those who have never done programming can approach PHP with great confidence.
Wide support
To learn PHP from scratch, to understand it better or to know individual cases of use there is a very large online library.
In addition to php.net, a site with the official material, there is a wide variety of sites to consult. W3CSchools, Mr. Webmaster and many others resources help newcomers to build PHP applications in no time. And this contributes to the great popularity of this language.
Speed, low use of resources and supported by all web servers
PHP does not require high machine resources to run and is, therefore, very fast and lends itself to applications integrated with others. These are some reasons why almost any public web server is enabled to run PHP scripts by default.
Open-source and free
Since PHP is an open-source language, many tools for writing your code and testing your applications are free. Few of the excellent editors that support PHP syntax are Notepad ++ (works only on Windows), Notepadqq (for Linux), Textmate (Mac only) and Komodo .
Great for interacting with MySQL databases
PHP is structured to interact very well with MySQL databases (other open-source software).
Since version 4.1.13, PHP supports MySQLi library, which includes excellent functions for interacting with the database. It brings about the PDO object that, in addition to simplifying the procedures for interactions with the database, serves to avoid SQL Injection. Thanks to the prepared statements, this feature improves the security of the databases.
Classes and frameworks to facilitate application development
It is possible to find different class components and frameworks to develop complex applications in PHP.
Among these is PHPMailer, for sending emails from the server with SMTP authentication. It is especially useful for testing the sending from a site loaded in a virtual machine. FPDF helps to create .pdf files in a dynamic way. Zend is a complete and useful library for many operations, including large enterprise applications. And who could forget WordPress, which currently supports one in every three websites on the internet.
Conclusions
PHP has been one of the most popular web development languages for the past 23 years. It is constantly evolving in response to the demands of the modern age. It made a quantum leap with version 7 in 2016, which improved its performance more than twice. Currently, it is at version 7.2. We advise anyone who starts developing web applications to study this language and follow its development.
The most popular CMS, such as WordPress, Joomla, Prestashop and Magento are written in PHP. Sites made with these platforms work well across many servers devices.