The popularity of PHP, the importance of PHP and the strength of PHP are increasing day by day. PHP started from Rasmus Lerdorf‘s desktop as a simple parser turning tags into equivalent C functions. Today it is already an OOP conscious language.
The roadmap has been long, (and still way to go) but never impossible with a group of determined developers turning it into a successful collaborative work it is today. PHP version 5.3.x offers most of what we can expect of an OOP language; classes, inheritance, composition, namespace. And I can tell you that version 6 would be another milestone revolution in PHP.
Along side, to ease amd accentuate PHP programming, a lot of tools and methodologies have also accompanied it. PHP, as other languages (such as Java, .NET, C++ or Rails), is entitled to:
- Frameworks – Solar PHP, Zend, Symfony, CodeIgniter, CakePHP
- Template engines – PHP Savant, Smarty, PHPTal
- Database layers and ORMs – ADODB PHP, Doctrine
- Compilers – RoadSend, PHC… and newly HIPHOP
- and Testing Units – PHPUnit
As for hosting, PHP-based web hosting is one of the cheapest and most famous in the industry as compared to other platforms. And it is one of the most readily-available; almost all web-hosting companies offers PHP-Apache-MySql environments.
PHP, once, was believed by most people as a less prominent ‘thing’ and just a lousy scripting language. Well, this was very immature of their part since at its outset the philosophy proned by Rasmus was very clear:
PHP always tries to find the shortest path to solving the Web problem. It does not try to be a general-purpose scripting language and anybody who’s looking to solve a Web problem will usually find a very direct solution through PHP. Many of the alternatives that claim to solve the Web problem are just too complex. When you need something up and working by Friday so you don’t have to spend all weekend leafing through 800-page manuals, PHP starts to look pretty good.
The potential of PHP was already there, those PHP ‘not-so-friend’ just had their eyes elsewhere. There’s a lot of big names on the Internet being powered by PHP, namely WordPress, Joomla, Magento, and Facebook (amongst others).
Even Haiping Zhao, a Senior Engineer at Facebook said in his new HipHop innovation:
For the past six years, we have been able to accomplish a lot thanks to rapid pace of development that PHP offers. As a programming language, PHP is simple. Simple to learn, simple to write, simple to read, and simple to debug. We are able to get new engineers ramped up at Facebook a lot faster with PHP than with other languages, which allows us to innovate faster.
What more to it do people need to be convinced that PHP is at the top, among other rockstars?
Most of my colleagues are .NET programmers and I can tell you that when you are a PHP fan, it’s not an easy thing. Most of them have a very silly conception about PHP, I can even recall a supposed “project lead” saying: “PHP? ah, the kid’s lame toy? no no, I don’t do PHP at all”. One thing comes to my mind when I hear those stupid remarks, RETARDS. (full-stop)
But as a programmer, you should respect each programming language as the tools to mould the end-product. Each of them has their own targeted usage and audiance. But never ever say one is best than the other without understanding what each of them has to offer and for what it is targeted.
[LOGIC + Methodology + Programming Language + Skill == Effective and Efficient END_PRODUCT] ~ K_Wasseem