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I’ve been working on my book for quite some time now and I have to say that while writing I sometimes find myself in a position where I think: How come I do that, or why do I really do that.

One of these moments happened when I came up with a chapter on why to use PHP. A sure thing in a PHP book in my opinion, it being in it was as sure as sun rising in the morning, but the answer to that question up front was simply because I like it. Now that doesn’t do it, especially not for a book right? So I had to spend some minutes to reflect about why do I use and like this
programming language called PHP?

I ended up with ten points on why I use PHP and I guess this would be a good post here on my blog, as it seems people like lists in general and maybe I could get some people out there that aren’t really sure about whether PHP is good or bad, to get some insight at least.

Well I will not answer that question for you, you already know my opinion, what you think is up to you, I will simply share 10 points that put me on the “pro” PHP side.

1. The PHP Community

The best thing about PHP is the huge community around it and that’s why I’m listing this as number one. I personally believe that without the great community PHP wouldn’t have become what it is today.

So what makes the community so great you might ask?
Well there are many reasons that makes it so great and I’ll mention the most important reasons.

For once they are a great resource, whether it comes to getting help or finding code examples regarding PHP. You have a problem with your code, no problems as there are literally hundreds of sites with forums and mailing lists where you can ask for some help to figure out what’s wrong. You can ask for advice if you hit a wall while coding and don’t know what solution would be best.

There are a great amount of sites with tutorials and code examples on how you code certain PHP applications and scripts, where you can see how you go about in making a forum or whatever you might be wondering, or simply get inspiration to your projects.

This point alone has a lot to do with why I like PHP and the community around it so much!

2. Learning PHP is easy!

Another reason why I like PHP is because it’s very easy to learn and get a hang of compared to some other languages I’ve learnt over the years.

I started learning PHP in the end of the fifth grade, so I was quite young in my opinion and I managed to learn it, not master it at the time, but I could produce some simple scripts back then.

Learning PHP isn’t rocket science and with the great amount of help found on the net it makes the learning process much easier. As I mentioned earlier, there is a great community that you can take advantage of while learning it.

Another thing that makes PHP easy to learn for other programmers, especially the Perl, C and C-like language programmers (Java and C++) is that the PHP syntax is based on primarily C and Perl.
This means that if you have experience with any of those languages you will pretty much be producing productive code instantly.

3. Its Performance

The performance of PHP is great, it’s very efficient. Using it on a single inexpensive server you can literally serve millions of hits each day.
Zend Technologies (www.zend.com) released benchmarks which show that PHP outperformed its competition.

If you want to run a large number of commodity servers then your capacity is for sure unlimited.
In other words PHP has a great performance rate!

4. The low cost

The price of PHP is the amazing amount of zero.
It’s free and you can download the latest version of PHP at any given time from www.php.net

5. It’s Open Source, You can modify it

Open Source which means that you have complete access to its source code.
If you want to modify or simply add something to the language, you can do it. Unlike commercial closed-source applications you don’t have to wait for the manufacturer to release patches, if you have the knowledge you can do it yourself.

But with the great community around PHP, patches and fixes appear much faster, a lot thanks to PHP being Open Source, more people can contribute.
Also you won’t have to worry that the manufacturer will go out of business, thanks to it being Open Source and the great community the product lives on.

6. The built in libraries

PHP was designed to be used on the Web, because of this it has a lot of built in function, to be used for many different web related tasks.
You can connect to web services and other network services, parse XML, send email, generate PDF documents, send emails and generate GIF images on the spot.
This is just some of the functions you find in PHP.

A part from the official libraries, some programmers have developed more libraries that can be found, whether it’s a library with functions to work with audio or video or something completely different it most likely already exists.

And that’s another good part of PHP; you can add custom libraries to it all after you needs.

7. Its Portability

Today PHP is available for many different operating systems whether it’s a free Unix like operating system such as Linux or a system you paid for like Microsoft Windows you can run PHP on it.
I won’t list all the operating systems that you can run PHP on here, for that I suggest you to google it.
Well written code will usually work without modifications on different operating systems with no hassle. Of course there are functions in PHP that only work on a specific operating system, so it not working on a different wouldn’t be any surprise.

8. It has a strong Object-oriented support

PHP version 5 has very well designed object-oriented features.
If you’re not using PHP 5 yet I strongly recommend reading my post on
why to use PHP 5.

It now has features like inheritance, private and protected methods and attributes, abstract classes and methods, constructers, interfaces and destructors.
There are even features of built in iteration behavior which was available in version 3 and 4 but the over all object oriented support in PHP 5 is much more complete in php 5.

If you program in C++ or Java then all this will be familiar to you, and PHP’s syntax being very similar as well will just make it all a lot easier.

9. It has interfaces to a large variety of database systems

Whether you’re using MySQL, PostgreSQL, mSQL, Oracle, dbm, FilePro, HyperWave, Indormix, InterBase, Sybase databases, you can connect to those with PHP, there are many more but I found that list long enough.

PHP 5 also has a built in SQL interface to a flat file called SQLite.

10. Support available

Zend technologies the engine powers PHP offer support and related software on a commercial basis.

So if you’re a company which wonders if choosing PHP will leave them in the dark then here’s you’re answer, support is available if needed.
Also for the non commercial users there’s support available in another form, the PHP community which I mentioned earlier.

And that’s the end of the list: why I like PHP.
I hope you enjoyed it and feel free to add anything else you like about PHP that I didn’t come up with at the time I was writing this.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 3:33 pm and is filed under Article, PHP, Personal. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.