As the market is growing and changing rapidly, so do its needs and requirements. In order for these needs to be satisfied, there are a lot of new programming languages that are created to do exactly that. However, there are some programming languages that can be still used despite the growing changes. One of them is PHP. We believe that PHP has a bright future, regardless of the fast development of the market and technology. We will try to briefly explain why we believe in it.
We all know that PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development. It is fast, flexible and pragmatic, and moreover PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world. Every user on the internet, in general, is surrounded by PHP. What we mean is that PHP is used by more than 75% of all websites with a known server-side programming language. So almost 8 out of every 10 websites that you visit on the Internet are using PHP in some way. (Statistics source: https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php )
This number is very stable, and over the years has not been changed drastically, a reason why we believe that it might not change soon, though changes might happen overnight. Regardless of the advancements in technology, we believe that PHP will be widely used in the future, it will evolve in many ways, and the different metrics and statistics will go up, or at least stay at the same level. This is very optimistic and encouraging for the PHP developers and for everybody who wants to start learning PHP.
A very big advantage is that almost every company needs a website, or has an official company website that needs to be maintained, and in most cases, those websites are developed with PHP – one simple reason why there are a lot of open job positions for PHP developers.
But, what are the things that keep and will keep PHP so popular on the WEB?
Following several aspects that we feel are worth mentioning and noticing.
Popular Platforms and Frameworks
1. WordPress – CMS
WordPress is an online, open-source website creation tool. But in a non-geek language, it’s probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS) in existence today.
And guess what? It is written in PHP.
WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system, so it’s about as popular as it can be. WordPress dominates other markets, like eCommerce, so it’s definitely not just for blogging.
Having in mind that over 40% of all the websites on the internet use WordPress, then it is obvious why PHP is still popular and will remain like that.
Statistics source: https://kinsta.com/wordpress-market-share/
2. Laravel – Framework
Laravel is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax written in PHP. They’ve already laid the foundation — freeing you to create without sweating over the small things.
For the purpose of this blog post, we have chosen to mention Laravel, because it is the most popular PHP framework and most used framework among the PHP developers.
According to the statistics, more than 43% of the developers prefer to use Laravel against other PHP frameworks. And that percentage increases on a daily basis.
Laravel has a very big and high-quality community, the framework is updated regularly, the number of packages for Laravel is increasing, so more and more people use it and will start using it.
Maybe Laravel is a small piece of the entire PHP, but in the near future, it will be one of the main and unbreakable parts of the daily working of the PHP developers.
Statistics source: https://www.excellentwebworld.com/best-php-frameworks/
Latest Updates
PHP is updated constantly and with each new updated there are better features making the work of the developers a lot easier and more efficient.
The latest big update was the releasing of PHP 7. The developers were waiting for this update for a long time, but in the end, it was worth waiting. The newest features are great updates, and are promising good things for PHP in the future, of course, if the guys from PHP continue working like until today.
We are optimistic and ready to contribute at any time.
The latest release was PHP 7.4.0 (couple of days before writing this blog post). The features are promising, as the future of PHP is.
Machine Learning
Honestly, we were not sure about adding this part in this blog post. But, when we think better, we are quite sure that there will be a lot of PHP sources for machine learning implementation in the future.
What we have found over the internet is a machine learning library built on top of PHP. That is a small step, but guarantees a lot for the future and makes the developers optimistic.
If interested, check the library: https://php-ml.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
We are aware that any library for machine learning built on top of PHP is not a first option for the developers. Also, this library doesn’t include all the algorithms. But, because Machine Learning is not practically used yet (for PHP purposes) and is not that popular among the developers at this moment, we don’t think it is a problem for now. We are optimistic about this library and that the other resources will be available in the near future. With the speed that PHP evolves, and also the trends that it follows, we believe that PHP and Machine Learning will be our next topic.
Popular sites use PHP
Before jumping to our conclusion, here is a list of websites that use PHP as server language:
- Wikipedia
- Gox (now gone)
- Flickr
- Yahoo!
- iStockPhoto
- Tumblr
- com
- Mailchimp
Conclusion
PHP has a bright future. As you can see the most popular websites today are built using PHP, so the views that PHP will be adjusted and will work hand in hand with Machine Learning are more than valid and with high chances to become a reality. All the explanations above support this statement. PHP is widely used, and there are a number of popular sites with highest rankings on Alexa uses PHP as server language. All that guarantees that in future PHP will be used more and more, while in the meantime solving a lot of problems and fixing a lot of issues with each update.
