Mediaboss Marketing

Where We Came From

PHP has come a long way from humble beginnings: it started out being a collection of tools (mostly Perl scripts) that recorded the traffic on Rasmus Lerdorfs online resume (PHP stood for Personal Home Pages,) and has risen to being a fully (almost) object oriented language. It has become the leading language on the web: more websites run on PHP than all the other websites combined (well look at the stats shortly.) In the mean time sites like Facebook and Wikipedia have grown to dominate the web, CMS systems like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and many more have become the foundations of a great number of websites, and frameworks have blossomed: from Codeigniter to Zend Framework, Yii to Laravel, you are simply swamped with choices when searching for one to use. Design patterns seem to matter lately, with MVC being the most popular.

When you stop to think about it, you wonder why so many websites are built on PHP. If you have ever developed anything in PHP, though, you will realize why: PHP is easy to learn, has great documentation, is simple to host and setup on a server and there are many IDEs that support PHP to a great degree (Zend Studio, Netbeans and PHPStorm are just the top of a very deep barrel.) You can connect PHP to just about any database, including but not limited to MySQL, MSSQL and Oracle.

The bad thing about where we are right now is that PHP is at a kind of precipice: and the next few years are vital to its existence. I dont think PHP is ever going to fall off the map completely at least not in my lifetime but I do think that what Zend does next will make or break it. Will PHP 6 be a complete rewrite of the core engine? Will PHP 6 address the developer annoyances with PHP? Will PHP 6 ever even be released? Weve been waiting for it for about 3 years now, and even Zend is mum on the subject. PHP has a lot of competition out there. ASP.net is one of them, but I think that the Ruby On Rails framework is a greater threat. Ruby is a great language and is also easy to learn. Its not that simple to host it, yet, but I believe that will change. If Zend drops the ball today, tomorrow will not look too good for PHP.

These are a few of the problems we are currently facing with PHP. Lets not kid ourselves. The language is inconsistent. Some functions can be called function_name() and others functionname(). The old needle and haystack (some functions arguments are function($needle, $haystack) while others are function($haystack, $needle)) issue is also a minor annoyance that forces me to visit php.net more often that I would really like to do. There are so many duplications of core functionality that it can become confusing to beginners. Not having scalar functions ($text->length(), for example) is a problem that, if solved, would make so many others go away. Am I being a sceptic? Yes, I guess I am. But as someone who has his primary income directly hitched to the PHP language, I think I have the right to be. I love PHP, but I hate the problems it currently has.

Lets take a look at some stats. According to w3techs.com, PHP is used by 81.7% of all websites. Of all these websites, 97.6% are using PHP 5, as can be seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1

PHP is still growing, although the growth has seemed to level out a bit, as expected. See Figure 2.

Figure 2

A look at the market position (Figure 3) is quite interesting. This shows us that more sites than not use PHP, but that PHPs average site traffic is less than, for example, Java sites. I believe this is due to the high security factor of Java sites, especially in the financial and enterprise application sectors.

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The State of PHP in 2014