Before diving into the main discussion, I feel like sharing some history and prospect PHP programming language seems fair.
Some successful companies who are using PHP from their start are – LiveRamp, Thumbtack, Dynamic Signal, Cloudflare, Accenture, Rackspace, Tesla, Nokia, Chegg, Slack, Sprinklr, Angie’s List, BrightRoll, Nutanix, Hortonworks, Zynga, MobileIron, Lyft, Zuora, Yesware, SolarCity, OnDeck, Hootsuite, Bigcommerce, BitTorrent, SeatGeek, Birchbox, Udemy, Flickr, Digg. The list goes on and on, but keep in mind some of those companies use other language along with PHP programming language. But you get the point why businesses, especially web service providers are using PHP so frequently.
Little known fact, PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page. PHP today is actually the successor to a product named PHP/FI. Created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf, the very first incarnation of PHP was a simple set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries written in the C programming language. Originally used for tracking visits to his online resume, he named the suite of scripts “Personal Home Page Tools,” more frequently referenced as “PHP Tools.” Over time, more functionality was desired, and Rasmus rewrote PHP Tools, producing a much larger and richer implementation.
With the introduction out of way, let’s talk about how PHP can be beneficiary for your startup business –
1. User-Friendly & Easy to Code
Designed in a user friendly manner, PHP gives more flexibility than C, C++ and ASP and overall helps in increasing traffic to the site, which is your ultimate goal for web development project. It has a readable and easily understandable syntax. Its code is embedded in the HTML source code and it is based on C/C++. Therefore, it is very familiar and programmers are very comfortable coding with it.
2. Easy to Code
You might think why it matters to you whether it is easy to code or not; after all, you’re not the one doing it, the programmer is. It does matter because building your web application or website is not the end. There is a matter of maintenance and upgrade. In order to get better results over time you have to change content and view based on the market demand. You might have to get a new programmer to review the code to find out the existing bugs or alter the code to give the application a new look altogether. But it will be tremendously tough for any new programmer to find out the problem and make changes over the complicated code of other programming language. But in PHP it’s very easy to understand; so when you decide to upgrade your website or change certain things, your new programmer will know exactly what to do and thus the changes will be done more efficiently.
3. High Compatibility & Platform Independent
PHP is highly compatible with leading operating systems, web servers and many other different platforms. PHP scripts can run across operating systems such as Linux, Windows, Solaris, OpenBSD, Mac OSX etc and also provide support for all major web servers such as Apache, IIS, iPlanet and also supports all major databases including MySQL, dBase, IBM DB2, InterBase, FrontBase, ODBC, PostgreSQL, SQLite, etc.
4. Powerful & Versatile
Nowadays PHP programming is used in various web portals. Starting from small business websites to gigantic organizational web applications, informative forums, chatting platforms, CRM solutions, e-commerce shopping carts, community websites, e-business and database driven apps can be easily developed using PHP.
PHP programs can be used to design any type of website and capable of handling web applications with a lot of traffic. Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia are a few examples of massive visited social networking sites made up of PHP framework and because it is server-side scripting, it can do anything that other CGI programs can do.
5. Quicker Developments & Faster Processing
PHP is designed to work well with the web, and so things like accessing the GET and POST and working with HTML and URLs are built-ins in the PHP language. This makes it really concise and straightforward to develop a website.
It uses its own memory space and thus decreases the loading time and workload from the server. The processing speed is fast and web applications like Ecommerce, CRM, CMS and Forums are also developed faster with it.
6. Most Trusted & Proven Since Two Decades
PHP programming has been used in web development for the last two decades since its inception in 1995. It is trusted by thousands of business websites owners and developers and the list is growing every day. It has also proven its capability and versatility by developing and maintaining some of the most highly visited and popular websites.
As a business website owner, if you are planning to update and manage your web functionalities dynamically; the first option for you is PHP Web Development. It’s easy to use, reasonably priced and integrates many platforms and a range of online web applications.
7. Easy to Embed
This trait keeps the language more portable to the users whoever avails it for their application need to be developed. Users can bind their needed HTML blocks with the coding, which results the web solution can be more attractive and flashy.
By eyeing on the essentiality of the users demands and expectations, PHP has framed these enchanting benefits and excellent options. So whenever the user attempts to implement some HTML ingredients with the web application, they can optimize their coding and make it more flexible and easy.
8. Extensions
This is another exclusive benefit of PHP which greatly helps the user to manage the source code with XML manipulation. Using this extension feature, source files can be modified and integrated with any kind extension settings. PHP has multiple extensions and is extremely scalable. When you hire PHP developers, they ensure that the results are measurable. This helps you calculate your ROI and gives you a better position over the competition.
9. Security
PHP is a powerful and flexible tool. This power and flexibility comes from PHP being a very thin framework sitting on top of dozens of distinct 3rd-party libraries. Each of these libraries have their own unique input data characteristics. Data that may be safe to pass to one library may not be safe to pass to another. When we talk about security in a web application we really have two classes, remote and local. Every remote exploit can be avoided with very careful input validation. A variation of the remote exploit is the XSS or cross-site scripting problem where one user enters some Javascript that the next user then views.
Bottom line is, you want your web project to be flawless and PHP is the best in the bunch to do it for you without any hiccup. So what is your favorite programming language and why is that?