Invented in 1995 by Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP has gained massive growth and prominence and has evolved into one of the most powerful and favoured programming languages, backed by a massive community of users and developers.
Also known as Hypertext Preprocessor, PHP is a server-side language that allows the creation of dynamic websites and applications. The fact that the world today enjoys interactive and dynamic web pages is largely impacted by the use of PHP in developing websites by developers. the largest social networking platform Facebook has also been created with PHP.
The major Features of PHP make it a popular choice among developers and programmers. PHP is one of the hottest choices for coding and web development. It has a syntax similar to that of C. From giving interactive user experience to offering convenient development processes to developers, PHP is here to stay. With businesses moving towards digitalized methods engaging customers with interractive web content is crucial.
In this post let us discuss the major features of PHP and how its uses give a cutting-edge advantage to programmers and developers.
Top Features of PHP
The extensive list of the features of PHP sets it apart from the rest of the languages. Let us dig deeper into these major features of PHP.
Open Source
The number one in the list of features of PHP list is its nature of being an open source. This means that users do not need to make payments for using its frameworks, database, debugging tools, etc. or to run code with PHP. Users have the freedom to download PHP and develop websites or web applications with it at any time.
Extensive Library
One of the best features of PHP language is its extensive library. Typically, programming languages feature libraries with pre-written and optimized codes that enable the code to run smoothly and minimize poor performance. Developers can explore the extensive resources in PHP like Django, Symfony, CodeIgniter, etc.
Highly versatile and Adaptable
Another one of the significant features of PHP that makes it unique is its adaptability with numerous other platforms and technologies. PHP is highly flexible and it can be integrated into databases like MySQL. This feature has made it the choice for popular content management systems such as Joomla, WordPress, etc.
Strong Community Support
Another advantageous feature of PHP language is its huge community of developers and users. Its extensive community support has been instrumental in improving the language’s functionality and several other features that fit the demands of time. The community has active and hands-on PHP users and developers contributing multiple resources such as web-based content, blogs, videos and audio.
Other Features
Maintenance at PHP is an easy task as it features a Model View Controller framework (MVC) which performs as a helping hand. With PHP developers or users can gain access to real-time insights, quick speed, possibility of integrating PHP with multiple other platforms. Its security feature also makes it a great choice for users.
How are the Features of PHP language more advantageous over Other Languages?
We have discussed the major features of PHP language, making it stand apart from the rest. Let us now get a better understanding of how these features are more advantageous.
Scalability
PHP is advantageous over other programming languages as it enables the running of large-scale projects. Some of the popular instances of PHP use are WordPress, Facebook, Tumblr, Mailchimp, etc. PHP offers quick loading and fast loading of web pages of the sites created with PHP. This implies users of people visiting the web pages or sites created on PHP will enjoy quick loading sparing them long wait times.
Free Access
As PHP is an open-source language users can enjoy free accessing and using of the extensive frameworks and libraries.
Its features and functionalities are all available for free. Hence it is a better choice over closes-sourced where users do not need to incur high expenses.
Support from the Massive Community
The best advantage of this feature of PHP language is that its huge community is ever ready to help users with any problem they face in the development process. They can pose their query to the community and multiple software developers from around the world will be ready to give their support, suggestions and directions. This community of PHP is known as the most active community among developers.
Ease of use
The simplicity and ease of learning feature of PHP language has made it highly ideal even for beginners. The availability of multiple resources, frameworks, and libraries enables easy use and learning while on the go and also guarantees the speed and efficiency of the code run on PHP.
Lightning speed
Many developers and pro-users of PHP claim the speed of PHP is three times as fast as Python. The new updated PHP 7 version is reported to have even better speed compared to the previous versions. Following the analysis and study made by Benchmarks Game’s data, PHP web pages record an approximate speed of 17.81 seconds to load.
There we have made a comprehensive listing of the top features of PHP languages and how these features proffers cutting-edge advantages over other programming languages.
Read Also: A Comprehensive Guide to PHP: Understanding its Key Features