PHP: An insight into the popular web development language

Web is dynamic in nature, things change faster than we blink an eye. In the infancy days, internet was static, meaning it didn’t change unless the site owner/administrator changed anything in it. But these days the user generates the content. Blogs, forums, social networks, all are public generated content. All this became possible with the advent of the dynamic languages. HTML allowed the creation of web pages easily, but updating them required manual updating by the webmaster. Whereas dynamic websites use a database and a dynamic language which made it possible to update the website without the intervention of the webmasters.

Now the dynamic languages have come a long way, they have a long history and they are now the de facto standard to run a website with even a faint possibility of user interaction. They provide endless possibilities to effectively run a website. Although there are many options available in the market, PHP stands out from the rest. PHP is installed on over 20 million websites and 1 million web servers. One doesn’t need any more convincing about PHP’s popularity. Quite clearly it’s the undisputed choice when it comes to server side languages used to run a website. So what makes PHP tick? Let’s find out.

Open Source

PHP is one of the most well known Open Source projects. It has been supported by the open source community and has been developed over the years into a robust language. Being free it has been adapted by the masses and is in vast use. It runs on any platform, be it Windows or Linux.

Simplicity and easy of use

PHP is easy to use and understand. With vast number of online resources, it’s very well supported and documented. Even if someone is having any issues, the abundance of online forums and documentation makes sure that there is a solution. It has many code libraries and references which makes it very easy to use.

Speed and performance

After so many years in existence, PHP has benefitted from the many years gone into its development. It runs very fast, it is complied by the PHP engine on the runtime, thus increasing the execution speed. It is very effective in working with the relational database systems. The highly optimized code means that it doesn’t strain the web server and the user’s machine doesn’t have to do much work, thus further making it easier and quicker to run the code.

Areas of application

Due to the huge popularity, PHP has found its place in almost every area of web application. Some areas of use include simple websites, forum systems, content management systems, blogging software and many more such places, where PHP is the most popular form of server side language. Some very popular websites such as Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, Digg, Joomla, WordPress, YouTube, Drupal and more run completely or some part of it on PHP.

So it doesn’t come as a surprise that what makes PHP so popular. With so many benefits and technological advancements, PHP not only helps in easy development of websites but also makes it easy and cost effective to manage it.