We do not want to repeat same story here again regarding how much PHP is resonant in the horde of web developers. Rather, we will take no rudimentary approach and see kinds of tasks supported by PHP as a platform whether it be with help from core language functionalities or with CMS or through routines of third party library like Laravel v2 with recent technology upgrades.
First we will take a look at performance part for which technology has received defamatory opinions from cross-programming language experts as well as due to bad coding practices from existing PHP developers also. To ensure application’s users aren’t left waiting, there are already many provisions and techniques but not widely known or used in the industry including:
- Setting up environment variables on Windows, Debian or Ubuntu
- Improvements in OOP features in PHP v7 comprising of type hints, group use declaration, old-style constructor deprecation and throwable interface
- Spaceship and coalesce operators
- Apache, NGINX and HTTP server connection optimization and persistence
- Varnish and full page caching
- Load balancing at infrastructure side
- Using Redis or memcached : the key-value cache store
- Debugging and profiling through Xdebug
- Percona XtraDB cluster
- Stress testing with tools like Apache JMeter
- Best practices in PHP programming with TDD, VCS, CI and service-oriented architecture (SOA)
and much more in upcoming research.
Naturally, explaining above tricks one by one would be defeating to purpose of the text due to requiring explanation with elaborate examples. If you remember olden days ( like 2011 ! ) building applications in PHP 4 was a simpler time as it could be intermingled with HTML and everything was resided in single file. Instead of frameworks, we had tons of libraries containing functions of specific category that got inherited. Applications were basically just CRUD but now development has changed several times since. A lot of work in R&D capacity has been executed and frameworks such as AJAX, PHPUnit, composer, and API-First are introduced.
All of these things have influenced how PHP developers build web or mobile softwares. Leveraging all the new tools that PHP gives you to build robust, faster, cross-device and stronger applications is a key to succeed and compete with so called 1st tier languages like .Net or Java.
Now coming to part of functional and other types of programming, PHP is generous to deliver fairly complex tasks gracefully without requiring programmer to write code from scratch. Given below is a succinct list of kinds of tasks achievable through direct or with third party framework inheritance:
- Implementing software design patterns
- Developing middleware
- Defining entities to match database tables
- Chaining $_POST validators
- Accessing web services by creating REST server and clients
- Robust handles to work with date/time and related international aspects
- Formatting currency numbers by locale
- Building a recurring events generator
- Displaying a multi-dimensional array and accumulating totals etc.
For a long time, Facebook has shown a vested interest to make PHP work for them and is doing amazing PHP things with its HipHop first compiler, now converted as a VM. Lot of improvements have happened in the world of dynamic language compilation since the Zend engine was introduced.
PHP has many strong points that make up for its bright future.
For example,
- It has modules for everything you need for instant development like for CURL, XML, LDAP, SOAP, encryption, hashing, strings etc.
- There are widely supported hosting environments and infrastructures which make it easy to deploy PHP written softwares. Although now-a-days, with the cloud this becomes less important still not everyone knows how to install and optimize integration of PHP on a server computer.
Alike other platforms, PHP offers a number of choices of development frameworks and we don’t define it as a bad factor because it’s easier to build an application of specific type like social media or healthcare website based on a skeleton of a cross-vendor product. There are much more things apart from MVC that get inherited from such frameworks with specific objectives.
Finally, two sublime things that impact choosing of technology are community support and proficiency over language. We can get all sorts of help from forums, eBooks and even online tutorials but knowing the language in the first-place will surely give an advantage, and a weak developer cannot input authentic opinion regarding tool. At this point, we all know that PHP has a great community of developers who are ready to help for all categories of topics and sub-topics.
At Bliss Web Solution Pvt. Ltd. , we have done extensive coding in described technology and we are obsessed to derive unmatched softwares written in PHP that can dominate specific sub-domains.
For any further discussion, please drop an e-mail at enquiry@blisswebsolution.com