Why PHP?
Posted: December 14, 2009 » by Lead Architect » in Tips and Support
In 2005, Netdrafter consolidated our programming services and settled on the use of just one advanced programming language to enhance regular web site HTML and interact with databases. The language we chose: PHP.
From the PHP.net web site: “PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. Much of its syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in. The goal of the language is to allow web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly.”
PHP was first assembled in 1995 and has been in continuous development ever since. According to the Programming Community Index, as of December 2009, PHP is the third most popular (and steadily growing) programming language. It is in use on over 20 million websites and installed on over 1 million web servers.
PHP is often noted for it’s superior scaling and development speed over Java and .net.
Reasons we chose PHP:
- open source
- overwhelming community support and documentation
- high performance, robust, and designed for web scripting
- interpreted or dynamically compiled
- ability to code within HTML
- low training and maintenance costs
Some well known web sites that use PHP include: Yahoo (search and news), Facebook and Friendster (social networking), YouTube (video), Wikipedia (wiki), Flickr (photo management), YouSendIt (file management), iStockPhoto and Photobucket (stock photography/image hosting), Vimeo (video sharing), Digg (news/user generated content), and millions of others.
Some well known applications written in PHP include: phpMyAdmin (database admin tool), osCommerce (e-commerce suite), Drupal and Joomla (content management software – CMS), Wordpress (blogging), MediaWiki (wiki), SugarCRM (customer relationship management – CRM), and thousands of others.
We’ve worked with Java, .net, Perl, Cold Fusion, Visual Basic, and even Ada over the years and PHP is the clear favorite.
Case Studies and Further Reading:
- IBM: From Net.Data to PHP: A Comparison Study (PDF)
- PHP at Yahoo (PDF)
- PHP vs Java vs Ruby
Want to know more about our server setup and technology? Head on over to our “High Tech” Hosting page.
Looking for good PHP reference books and resources? Check out our post: Good Reference Books: Web Basics.