PHP is a general-purpose, server-side scripting language, the relative simplicity, and versatility of which, at the time, has arguably been one of the main reasons for the boom of web development as we know it today.

First appearing in 1994, PHP — recursively short for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor — now powers innumerable websites, from the smallest blogs to some of the most popular web services in the world, such as Facebook and WordPress.

Initially, PHP used embedded HTML code and was crude but over the past twenty-five years, PHP has come to rival JavaScript, Java, Python, and Ruby for reliable back end supremacy. The current version (stable version 7.1.4) of raw PHP coding language has evolved to power an estimated 82% of the internet (based upon server-side programming languages tracked by leading Web Technology Surveys).

Most developers choose PHP for its frameworks: universal, reusable software platforms that speed the design and development of software applications, products, and solutions. Software frameworks include support programs, compilers, code libraries, toolsets, and application programming interfaces (APIs). These different components enable the development of a project or solution customized to your business. PHP frameworks are innumerable with ones emerging rapidly but some of the most popular may serve your business needs, depending on your objectives and uses.

Why Use PHP Frameworks

• PHP frameworks speed development since they are reusable. Engineers work from pre-fabricated options to help you construct whatever your business needs, from complex queries to retrieve the data from the database. PHP frameworks provide CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, and Delete).
• Frameworks scale systems easily.
• Code maintenance is easier with the application code being concise, tested and easy to work with.
• Provides content management systems (CMS) that are easy to use, supported, customizable and offer SEO.
• Decoupling of objects, such as the model, the view and the controller in the MVC model ensures rapid development, the flexibility of reuse of parts.
• The don’t repeat yourself (DRY) principle ensures that minimal code has maximum impact.

Popular frameworks

WordPress
If you have ever read a private blog, there is a good chance it was hosted on the WordPress platform.. It is an open-source framework you can use to create a website, blog, or app, with thousands of plugins, themes, extensions, etc. It offers easy installation and configuration and is a great starting point, especially for those that place a higher value on development speed than a solution 100% tailor-made for their use-case.

Symfony
Symfony, a high-performance PHP framework, offers a set of at least 30 PHP Components from which to choose. The Symfony philosophy places a high value on best practices, standardization, and interoperability of applications, along with developer satisfaction, which means that building applications with Symfony are a fast and architecturally well-tested process. It boasts speed and a highly-customized solution for your needs. Some other popular frameworks are built from Symfony, including Laravel. Other popular projects and products such as Drupal use Symfony components. It integrates with third-party applications and works with AngularJS.

Laravel
Laravel is a “PHP Framework for Web Artisans” and thus places great value on beautiful code. One of its core design points are bundles, which are a modular packaging system that makes Laravel the best choice for those that want a completely bespoke solution. Though its development speed may be slower than Symfony, it offers many options for speeding up applications. Like most popular PHP frameworks, it offers a templating system and an excellent support community.

The Stack
PHP’s LAMP Stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) uses its components for smooth interactions between the client, web, business and database tiers that make up web applications and sites. The LAMP Stack uses the Linux OS, Apache web serving software, PHP applications, and SQL databases. There are variations on this stack but LAMP is completely platform-, server-, and database-independent. It can be used to write RESTful servers, which pull data from NoSQL databases (for enhanced flexibility) and forward them to Javascript-framework-based front-ends (more flexibility), or to write full-stack PHP applications built on top of a PostgreSQL database, using the framework’s templating engine.

Other Frameworks:
There are dozens of frameworks from which to pick for your project. Our developers specialize in helping you establish your vision and goals and selecting from among them all.

Dive Deeper Behind PHP Technology
PHP is a scripting language that can be used with a stand-alone interpreter or embedded into HTML and served through a web server with the appropriate PHP module — common choices being Apache and Nginx. It works with various operating systems (Windows and Mac), connecting clients through web servers to your business and databases.

When used embedded in HTML, the PHP interpreter will only process the PHP code within the PHP delimiters (most commonly). Two recent versions of the language added declaration support for classes and interfaces, arrays, “callables,” along with scalars and function return types.

PHP has been an Object-oriented Programming language since PHP v.3, though in v.5 object handling was updated for performance and features. It uses classical inheritance and since PHP 5 supports private and protected member variables and methods, abstract classes and methods, final classes and methods, a standard way of declaring constructors and destructors, and interfaces along with multiple interface implementation support.

PHP Implementations
There are several implementations of PHP. The original implementation, the widely-used and complete version, is the Zend Engine interpreter, which compiles PHP code on-the-fly. It is also considered the “reference implementation” of PHP.

The most popular “competitor” of the Zend Engine competes with another popular implementation the HipHop Virtual Machine — HHVM — created by Facebook, which uses just-in-time compilation to achieve up to 600% performance boosts by compiling PHP into an intermediate bytecode, which is then translated into x64 machine code dynamically at runtime.

Conclusion
So, is PHP right for you?

It offers frameworks and even pre-made solutions for just about every situation you could possibly imagine, and while its rapid evolution since PHP 5 may seem complex, Programmers.io’s developers are current and well-versed in using PHP code and frameworks. Our developers will help you select the right language, framework, components, extensions, and features for your project, from a simple site to complete application.