7 Myths About PHP for Web Development [2022 Edition]
Web developers must be wary of such misconceptions?
Here, are some common myths about PHP – let’s bust them!
59% of the world’s population is online and there are more than 1.9 billion websites live on the internet. This is one of the reasons why you can’t deny the fact that every business has to establish its digital presence via a well-developed website to survive amidst tough competition and consistently evolving competition.
Businesses are constantly looking for web development companies that can help them design a user-friendly website that can attract more target audiences. There exist numerous technologies such as JavaScript, PHP, Ajax, HTML, and more. However, website developers, as well as companies, are utilizing more PHP technology for the web development process due to considerable reasons.
Let’s look into what PHP is all about.
What is PHP?
PHP is also known as PHP Hypertext Preprocessor is an open-source server-side scripting language that is used to develop websites. Developers also make use of this general-purpose language to develop Static/Dynamic websites, web applications, and design projects such as Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs).
PHP earlier stood for Personal Homepage, when it was first introduced in 1994. The purpose of PHP then was to display time and track visitors on the creator’s home page. From simply being a CGI script to now having the most engaging features such as exceptions, PDO class, Namespaces, Resort Hashing API, and more, PHP has made significant progress.
Today, it stands for Hypertext Preprocessor and is recognized as the widely used technology for web development. It is the most used programming language used by around 78.9% of all known websites. Further, if we consider worldwide PHP market share, Statista reports that “PHP was the most popular programming language in 2021 with a market share of 45.43 percent.”
A lot of the world’s largest companies use PHP in their digital infrastructure. Whether it be for computing purposes or for server-side applications, PHP is deployed across leading companies for developing small/large web products. These tech leaders include
Top 7 PHP Myths Debunked
Myth #1 – PHP is Difficult to Learn and Use.
Fact: PHP might be considered a challenging language, however, it is the easiest programming language to learn of all. The first reason why it is trouble-free to learn PHP is that it has predefined rules of coding, abbreviations, and algorithms. Further, it has built-in functions and easy-to-use features such as namespacing, improved documentation, and more.
PHP codes can also be embedded into HTML codes. If you have got a background in programming, you’ll probably find it easy to learn the language. There are several resources available you can learn the PHP basics by enrolling for short courses that can be completed within a few hours.
Myth #2 – PHP is not object-oriented.
Fact: Many people believe that PHP is not object-oriented. But if we rely on the facts, PHP is an object-oriented programming language that supports a lot many components such as class and objects. The feature of object-oriented programming is the reason why developers can build reusable and complicated websites/web applications. The main OPP concepts supported by PHP include class and objects, interfaces, abstraction, overloading, constructor, and destructor. Despite the OPP function, you can also write procedural code.
Myth #3 – PHP is not scalable.
Fact: With the ability to expand with the increasing business needs, PHP is completely scalable. It can work with several frameworks like Zend, CakePHP, Symfony, and more. You can also scale PHP-based websites with cloud computing technology. It is not true that PHP is not suitable for building websites with a huge customer base. If we look around, as mentioned earlier, from small to large, every company irrespective of size and operations have their websites built on PHP backend. Even the leading companies such as Wikipedia, WordPress, and MailChimp are designed with PHP. If a website has an extensive live visitors base, PHP can monitor it via a digital server without any need for the auto-cluster function.
Myth #4 – PHP isn’t Safe.
Fact: PHP isn’t safe is the biggest misconception about PHP that is drooling around. If you think a website built using PHP language isn’t secure, you should answer the question ‘which language offers complete security against theft?”
Probably you’ve got your answer. Every language including Java, Rails, etc. has its vulnerabilities that cannot be controlled by using any specific web development language.
PHP is as secure as any other programming language. Further, the programming language has nothing to do with security levels. The level of security depends on the developers’ expertise, knowledge, and website functionalities. Even the best of languages or tools can be misused by the developers by simply writing faulty code. If you want to have advanced security, you can integrate tech-enabled software solutions, cloud security, and more.
Myth #5 – PHP is a strictly typed language.
Fact: PHP is not strictly typed, rather a weakly typed language as it doesn’t require developers to define the variable type. While defining a variable in these scripts, programmers are not needed to characterize or classify the data type stored in them.
While developing a website using PHP scripts, you need to use a sign for each type of variable such as string, integer, float, etc. Once you’ve assigned a string value to the variable and defined it as an integer or other type, it’s done.
Myth #6 – PHP is a slow language
Fact: Among the several reasons why PHP is a great option for developing websites, fast load time is one of them. PHP increases the site loading speed and enables visitors to surf the website in seconds. PHP codes run more swiftly as compared to other languages as it uses their own storage space rather than an overhead server or cloud system.
Moreover, if we consider the development part, PHP frameworks enable a developer to build a website easier, faster, and more efficiently. It streamlines the web application development process by offering libraries. With these libraries at the source, programmers don’t need to do heavy coding and hence, can build the website quickly.
Myth #7 – PHP is dying and may get outdated soon
Fact: With the leading tech giants such as Facebook, Spotify, and Wikipedia using PHP as their primary web development language for the last many years, the answer is NO. PHP is here to stay. It is continuously coming up with updates and offering the utmost stability and high performance. Even in the last 25 years, it’s still the most used website worldwide proving that PHP dying is just a misconception.
Conclusion
The benefits of using PHP as a programming language are hard to define in words. Day-by-day with the emerging technologies, it has introduced numerous new features and continuously focuses on saving time as well as the efforts of developers. The myths described might not be entirely false, however, you need to look over the other side that’s been overshadowed by these beliefs. On a whole, it is a comprehensive programming language, the usage of which is not to dwindle anytime soon.
