Is PHP Dead Or Is It Still Relevant?
Since the last decade, there have been countless debates on whether PHP is a dead language or not. In the past five years, most of the developers and professionals have declared it as dead. The disturbing thing about the newbies that have been recently introduced to the web development field is that they found these two perspectives about PHP very confusing.
On one hand, we get to hear that PHP is not that supportive according to the latest demands in the market. On the other hand, when we see the stats, we find that almost 79% of websites on the world wide web are based on PHP or somehow connected to it. Then why there is such confusion about these two perspectives about this language? In this post, we’ll discover the exact reasons that will solve this big question today.
PHP in Web Development
The role of PHP in web development is quite significant and it helps to develop cloud based applications. It is a server side scripting language that provides a gateway to implement business logic, Database operations and entertain clients request on the server. Here, client is the web browser that makes a request to perform a specific function and gets the result without knowing the technicality of the backed procedure. There have been thousands of management systems running on PHP today.
PHP links with databases like MySQL or Oracle to fetch the data for the users. Every website based on PHP must contain a database that stores all the information of the users, so that it can be processed to fulfill the user’s requirement. PHP has many shapes and forms. If we make it as MVC driven, it becomes Laravel. And, if we shape it into CMS, it becomes the most popular CMS framework the WordPress.
How is PHP Losing its Worth?
Despite being one the most widely used platforms for web development, PHP is losing its worth. The web development sector has made a lot of improvement in the last decade. Platforms like Python, React native, Golang and Node js have changed the way of development by introducing multiple innovative features such as non-blocking code execution, lesser Browser to hardware communication time and better usage of Hardware capabilities to foster Backend processing. Meanwhile, the client’s demand has increased by the time due to the competition and needs of the users such as high speed web pages, Progressive web applications and cross platform mobile apps. Hence, these are the key reasons for losing the worth of PHP as a programming language:
PHP doesn’t support the latest web architecture
Due to the increasing use of mobile apps, the web developers are focusing more than ever on mobile friendly websites and that what a user needs nowadays. For that purpose, the new technology is focusing and made an exponential shift on server-less architecture that makes web apps performance faster and efficient. Sadly, PHP doesn’t support server-less web apps because it must need the Apache server for analyzing all the data. Meanwhile, by using latest tech stack, applications are being built to provide more concurrency, rapid response and optimum use of bandwidth, which are not the key points that were kept in mind while devising PHP.
The scalability of PHP is quite low
Although there are such vendors who have employed their own PHP frameworks to increase the scalability. Facebook is one of the biggest examples and wordpress too, through which you can even develop an ecommerce website by just doing drag and drop.
According to the latest digital requirement, PHP is not eligible to fulfill the requirement of the client and most importantly the need of the market. It means that you can't develop a large scale web app that can perform various functions with huge amounts of I/O operations and user management.
Limited option for Generating an API
API has an important role to create the pathway for the communication throughout your web application. PHP lacks native essence to build APIs unlike Node.js or even Django. Developer has to go as old school way to implement JSON driven APIs. Although PHP allows you the accessibility for creating an API by using JSON. If we compare such API with the modern standard then there’s a huge difference.
Lack of libraries for modern functions
The libraries of PHP are limited if we compare it to the latest programming languages. It doesn't only question its functionality but also its working efficiency. If a client demands a function that is not available in the PHP library, then 9/10 times you have to reinvent the wheel unlike in using other backend languages.
Why is PHP Still the Most Widely Used Language?
Despite all the drawbacks of PHP, there is no doubt that it is still the most widely used programming language in the world. The reason is quite simple that it has been serving for a long period in the web development industry and it is easy to learn. That’s why most of the developers choose it despite all the web based security risks.
When you use something for a long time it is difficult to get rid of it in an instance. So, PHP is a popular programming language and still it serves the requirements of most of the clients. So, based on its drawbacks we can’t conclude that PHP is dead or there is no use. There is a possibility that its influence might decrease by the time but it isn’t going anywhere in the near future. At least not within the next decade. So it is safe to say that PHP is still relevant even in modern times.
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