Reasons to Love and Hate PHP as a Development Platform

PHP – The inception of web domain specific language: We can’t ignore the tremendous popularity of web applications in recent period. In 21st century if anything has grown to an unexpected volume then it is none other than web applications. There are many factors that have encouraged the increase in the use and demand of web applications in past few years. Sudden increase in the coverage area of mobile networks in developing countries like India and China is one of the biggest key behind this change. Moreover, use of hand held devices like smart phones, tablets and net books which are having the capability to browse web applications on the go using internet through mobile networks is also encouraging the use of web applications throughout the globe. To gain the maximum from this opportunity many web specific languages get born in this period. PHP is one such language which can be used to develop enterprise standard web applications for any domain and industry.

Benefits of PHP – Why we love it: In a period when there is a tremendous popularity of web applications, it is obvious to expect tremendous popularity of web languages like PHP in the industry. PHP has many unique features that make the web developers to think about it.

Easy to Learn: PHP is a language which can be learned by self study from the contents available in the websites. Moreover, a PHP developer can start developing a PHP website from very beginning by watching or reading many tutorials from the web. Since PHP doesn’t have a separate page for backend programming; rather, the PHP developer can write both frontend as well as backend programming in the same page, hence he can view the effect quickly in the browser. This improves the interest of the developer to learn more and more.

Faster web development using PHP frameworks: There are a lot of frameworks and CMS available for PHP. A PHP developer can use any of these tools to develop modern web applications using PHP and MySQL in a much faster way. These frameworks have MVC architecture which helps in developing enterprise standard web applications using asynchronous and dynamic web page.

Modern web app development: PHP can be integrated with modern technologies like HTML 5, CSS 3 and jQuery etc to build modern web applications for different platforms and different screen sizes. This makes it fit to work in any hand held devices like smart phones and tablets without compromising on the user experience.

Everything comes with some drawbacks:

Speed of the application: Though PHP can handle web application which is not that much data driven but it fails significantly when there is a need of extensive server connection for the application. In that situation the PHP programme doesn’t respond properly as we can expect from a reliable application.

Security issue (A downside w.r.t. Java): Java has an undisputed record for security environment which lacks in case of other languages including PHP.

Trust factor for huge and heavy applications: Still today any client who is in a mood to develop huge application doesn’t show faith over an open source language like PHP. We can treat it as a herd mentality or anything but at the end of day we have to accept that we hardly find any financial institute like banking sector that trust on PHP for their web development. The security issues make it a secondary choice to develop a financial application using PHP. This would help you leverage the benefits of PHP certified professionals when hiring services of a custom PHP development company in India.

We provide custom PHP development services. To hire PHP developer from us, please reach out to us at Mindfire Solutions.