europeanUnion

PHP

What is PHP

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is the most commonly used programming language for building websites and web applications, and it was designed for this purpose by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. Since then, the language has been systematically developing to meet the latest needs and trends.

PHP is a scripting language, which means that the source code is interpreted by the server rather than compiled into machine code. This means that the script code is executed live while the program is running, and changes to the code are immediately visible without the need to recompile the entire program.

PHP is supported by most web servers and is available for many operating systems, including Windows, Linux, macOS and others. It is also easily accessible and free to download and use.

Advantages

universality – platform independence,
speed of operation – optimized for network processing,
scalability – it can be used to create both small applications and complex systems,
speed of creation – thanks to a wide range of external libraries and frameworks,
availability – it is an open-source language,
cost savings due to free availability,
readability and transparency of the source code,
a rich library of standard packages, i.e. a set of built-in and portable options,
managed memory – memory allocated to the program and no longer used is freed,
supporting a friendly language-using community.

Application

The initial primary use of PHP was to add interactivity and dynamics to websites. However, this language has a much wider range of possibilities. It can be used both to build a small script run on the command line and to create complex systems where PHP is used to implement business logic and data processing, i.e. to create the so-called backend.

In other words, PHP can be used to write simple websites as well as web, mobile and desktop applications. It can be used to set up an online store (e-commerce) as well as an extensive system consisting of many modules, such as: CMS, CRM, PIM, BI, SCM, WMS, DAM and many others.

Frameworks

PHP has numerous frameworks (ready-made schemes), i.e. sets of tools, libraries and scripts that improve the programmer’s work by providing ready-made solutions and promoting good programming practices. Currently, there are many popular PHP frameworks, but the most popular are Laravel and Symfony.

Both Laravel and Symfony are based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern, which allows for easy management of business logic and data presentation. Both frameworks provide many ready-made modules and libraries that facilitate the creation of applications, such as routing, ORM, Authorization and Authentication, Migrations and many others. Despite numerous similarities, it is worth paying attention to what distinguishes a given framework from others, so that its choice is best suited to the needs and requirements of the project.

Laravel is the most popular PHP framework. Its greatest advantage is ease of use. Laravel offers ready-made tools to handle common functionality out-of-the-box because they are directly integrated with this framework.

Symfony focuses on providing flexibility and performance. It provides a very large number of ready-made components, but they are not directly integrated with the core-m framework. This makes Symfony more scalable and allows you to use exactly the tools you need.