PHP Future – Is PHP Scripting Language dying in 2023?

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PHP Language Future - Is PHP Dying in 2018

PHP Future – Is PHP Scripting Language dying in 2023?

In 1995 PHP came into existence as one of the most renowned server-side scripting languages that were designed and developed for website development.

Today, we can say that a big part of server-wide web development is dominated by PHP. Besides, different websites like Facebook and Wikipedia as well as like Joomla, Drupal, Magento and WordPress are built on PHP.

What is PHP?

The expansion of the term PHP is Hypertext Pre-processor is a widely used server-side scripting language for web development and for other general purposes.

It has good compatibility with HTML and can be set into HTML easily. PHP mainly manages the server side.

What is the current status of #PHP usage in 2023 Click To Tweet

However, this is not the main cause it was designed for as it was intended to be utilized while developing web applications to make dynamic web pages.

It is hence that the PHP code is rooted into the HTML fundamental document and changed over with the assistance of a web server which has a PHP processor unit that creates the web page content.

Where is it used?

In the early statement, we have already stated that this language is used in web development for positive results.

To start with this amazing server side scripting language can be used to perform different jobs. One such task performed by this is to develop dynamic web pages having active content which consist of animation and flash in this manner making it feasible for you to make a customized website which can be the focal point of consideration for different users or visitors.

Another task of PHP is to use it from the side of an independent customer. Because of the way that PHP is free to use, it is very simple to set it into HTML.

Programmers and web developers also make utilization of PHP MYSQL to control and repair all front, backend activities and script installations without any inconveniences.

It can also be used broadly and expansively when it is the matter of creating email supervision, social media sites, software for content management and other tasks.

The demand and popularity for certain scripting language are continually changing. If you need to remain competitive in the present IT world, you have to live up-to-date on the current and latest programming languages so your abilities don’t drop out of support and eventually let you out of job alternatives.

How is PHP used?

PHP was designed to perform various functions, it has been upgraded now and so providing the ability to run command line interface functions.

It is also helpful in developing single page graphical applications. It is very flexible since it is compatible with almost all servers.

PHP Popularity in 2018-2019One more feature of PHP is that it can be incorporated into a large number of operating systems and also in their platforms with no charge.

The language has many competitors in the market which include server-side script engine, ASP (Active Server Page), ASP.net to mention only, however, a few.

It is very easy to know the popularity because about a million installations done on web servers and there are more than 20 million websites have installed PHP.

Now, these days a question is trending about PHP is that “is PHP dying or not in 2018” has become a center point among web developers.

#PHP is having tough fight with node.js and other new upcoming technologies Click To Tweet

Many programmers and developers think that the arrival of the latest programming languages like Lua, Python, Node.js, Ruby etc are affecting the popularity of PHP and are responsible for diminishing its usage among developers. In this writing, we are going to describe whether PHP is dying or not.

Simply say, the answer is Negative:

There are many causes on why the answer is no. As new languages are coming, PHP has a big list of applications, legacy applications, and users.

Now we also have a new version of PHP from version 5.x to 7.x. As a version of 5.x, 7.x and 8.x, we can see a drastic change in the performance increase in many applications – up to twice as fast.

Why PHP will not die in 2018 (PHP Future):

  • If we look at another reason than it is it provides dynamic access and execution of data. It allows developers to create dynamic websites. We are describing the various function that allows PHP to make its own code permitting it to make code within itself. This feature makes it very versatile but if coded poorly then increases the chances of vulnerable issues. Still, we think that there is no other languages allow developers to make websites dynamic easily.
  • One more feature we can see that PHP can be easily packaged with almost all Linux distributions and so it makes it very easy to run with 2 commands on the command-line.
  • PHP threads: The language has the ability to run different threads with the help of pthreads. Many people use it for the said reason. It definitely should be easy to enhance ability execution IMHO on multi-core systems.
  • PHP has some interesting modules such as for image processing it has integration with GD and many other modules which take the workforce of the programmers.
  • Most of company using PHP for their web application development.

While all these causes are sufficient to motivate people towards the usage of PHP, it may be possible that it will die at the time people look only for real-time applications but it very short to say here and need a big time to cover the state. It is just like a saying that one day the world will end but no one can tell when.

What is the future scope of PHP for Web Development Companies in 2018? Click To Tweet

Languages don’t die easily such as FORTRAN and BASIC are the older languages but still are in use by different developers.

On the other hand, open source languages have a long life than others because such types of languages are not dependent on a single developer, however, this is another matter altogether.

Tough PHP competition with Latest Scripting Languages:

  • People don’t like to use raw SQL commands anymore, they like to use the ORM layer to perform the same job.
  • Using Node.js tends towards that you have a PHP like a language that is both server side and client side, this is very attractive and beneficial for small-scale websites.
  • There are a big number of MVC frameworks for Node.js, from the big ones such as TowerJS, RailwayJS, Sail.js, and Express.js etc.

If we look at different statistical data available on the internet, it is clear that:

  1. Content Management Systems based out of PHP are increasing.
  2. ColdFusion, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, and Perl are in use by only a few web places but with a great amount of traffic.
  3. PHP is the most popular and widely used server-side scripting language and its usage by developers and programmers is increasing in every day. PHP Development in India uses latest version of PHP in web application development.
  4. It is used by many websites but with a lower amount of visitors or we can say traffic than server-side languages.

There are many reasons that elaborate the regular popularity in PHP.Let’s check out the reasons behind its popularity. Some of them are described here:

1. Easy to update

If you have a PHP based website then you will see that it is very easy to update such types of websites and updates are also instant.

As it is a server-side scripting language, all its updates will be done from the server side, not from the client side, so it is secure. Besides, not any browser setting can influence its updates.

2. PHP Experts Availability

There is a big number of PHP professionals and they provide support and maintenance related assistance. This particular feature of PHP allows site admin and users to get help swiftly all time they experience any technical issue.

3. Ample Documentation

As one of the widely used scripting language PHP provides comprehensive documentation support and it a fact that it is definitely a choice of every developer.

There are many PHP documentation available online altogether with a document generator. Most popular content management frameworks like WordPress get the benefit of customized documentation system. Basically, the documented elements are:

  • Inline comments.
  • Class methods and functions.
  • Hooks (filters and actions).
  • File Headers.
  • Includes and requires.
  • Classes and their properties.

4. PHP libraries

There is the excess of PHP libraries available to cope with the working of CMSs, shopping carts, blogging pages. These libraries are keeping PHP alive and maintaining PHP kicking.

They assist to make OOP effortless by providing a standard library of interfaces to the programmers. The well known and widely used PHP libraries are Symfony, CodeIgniter, Zend etc.

By using these libraries you can easily perform many tasks some of them are as follows:

  • Providing user-friendly and simple API.
  • Quick and bother free integration.
  • Error display with syntax highlighting.
  • Debug PHP codes and handling error.
  • Ready-to-use functions for working with various web services.
  • Support for multiple caching techniques.

In the Last Words:

In Current Time, PHP going to be dead easy because it is widely used and quite a popular scripting language. Whether there are many competitors of PHP, still this language is highly popular and demanded in emerging web applications. It has more than 75% of the web servers and still growing regularly.

It is just a rumor that PHP is dying. Go with it and keep growing with one of the most used scripting languages.

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Comments (3)

  • Sam Sharma Reply

    Nice article, though I would like to point out a few things. You mentioned that PHP will die when people only asks for real-time-applications. But there are very popular and production ready libraries and extensions in PHP like ReactPHP, Ratchet and Swoole which can be used for things like websocket server and various other things which are supported by platforms like Nodejs and Go. Infact, Swoole extension is way faster than Nodejs and it supports everything that Nodejs does. Moreover, PHP is not only for web application development, it is used in gui applications(QtPHP, Gtk etc), it can be used along side .net languages using Peach pie, it is used in IOT projects specially in gateways/edge etc.These are just a few areas where PHP is used outside of web development. Here I am talking about PHP 7. It is one of the fastest language out there without using JIT. JIT will be implemented in the future versions. It has all the modern features that a language needs and thanks to PSRs.

    July 28, 2018 at 2:05 pm
  • Anwar Reply

    Thanks so much for the write up. I was wondering about PHP’s future. But that first commenter blew me away with those add on modules for PHP.

    December 11, 2018 at 8:55 am
  • Waseem Ahmed Reply

    PHP will not die, One more great release of PHP will kill other languages.

    April 17, 2019 at 1:25 pm

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