PHP: Past, Today and Future

Post by Technology Park.

Past:

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 Lerdorf’s 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 (we’ll 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.

Today:

PHP is clearly the current market leader.

PHP is currently experiencing it’s golden age. I think this is because we have reached a point where more and more people are trying to learn to code, and the go-to language is currently PHP. Let’s face it: you can put a Wordpress blog together in no-time at all, and, using the excellent documentation, easily modify it as required. Do that long enough, and you’ll start to understand the language. That’s the good thing about where we are at this point in time.

PHP is used by 81.7% of all websites. Of all these websites, 97.6% are using PHP 5.

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

Future:

 The trend in PHP growth shows no sign of abating, however, and I think that this is the decade of the developer. I believe more and more people – and I’m not just talking about school leavers here – are starting to realize the benefits of understanding some kind of computer language. PHP is a good fit, again, and I think this is going to spur the growth on at a rapid rate.

PHP is very easy to learn & earn!!!!