PHP is much better than you think_PHP Tutorial

There are a lot of complaints about PHP, even from a lot of smart people. After Jeff Atwood wrote another complaint about PHP, I thought about the good things about PHP.

The biggest problem with these complaints is that they come from a lot of people who are still using older versions of PHP. They may be unwilling to care or unwilling to admit that PHP is evolving at a rapid speed both at the language level and at the community level. In fact it's evolving faster than any other language or web platform. While it wasn't always the case, PHP has been on an amazing journey over the past five years.

Before talking about the recent amazing achievements of the PHP community, let’s take a look at some interesting numbers: PHP is used by 77.9% of websites where the server-side programming language is known. Wordpress is used by 16.6% of websites worldwide. The three most commonly used CMS website building systems are: the first one is Wordpress with a share of 54.3%, the second one is Joomla with a share of 9.2%, and the third one is Drupal with a share of 6.8%. All three products are written in PHP.

PHP must be doing something right, right?

Now, let me tell you, the trick of PHP is: despite so many years of changes, PHP is still the easiest language to learn for non-technical people, which allows people to build dynamic websites faster than other technologies , also allows one to host the website without any hassle. PHP may not be the best designed language in the world, but it gets things done, there's no doubt about it.

PHP language

PHP 5.0 (released in 2004) brought a very practical object model...wait, I'm talking about something released 8 years ago. Fast forward to PHP 5.4, the most recent version of PHP, which brings the things you'd dream of in a modern web language: yes, PHP supports namespaces; yes, PHP supports closures; yes, PHP supports closures; yes, PHP supports namespaces. Yes, PHP supports traits.

Although it takes some time, PHP 5.4 brings some syntactic sugar to make the overall experience better than before: yes, PHP supports defining arrays with [ ]; yes, PHP supports newly created objects calling functions like this: (new Foo ())->bar (); Yes, PHP supports arrays to get elements like this: $foo->bar ()[1].

PHP even learned from its own mistakes: register_globals and magic_quotes were completely removed.

PHP has a built-in web server to facilitate local testing, and it can start in microseconds.

The next challenge: How do we update the tutorials explaining PHP on the Internet? What is the best technology to support WebSocket in PHP programs?

PHP Ecosystem

Having a good language is good, but having a good ecosystem is even better. The PHP ecosystem has evolved a lot over the past few years.

Git

I don’t want to discuss too much about Git. Git is used everywhere, and PHP quickly embraced Git. Almost every PHP library, framework, and product uses Git, including PHP itself.

Composer

Two years ago I wanted to get rid of the ugly PEAR code I hacked in symfony 1 to support plugins. I wanted to replace it with something that could manage project dependencies, rather than a monolithic installation like PEAR, so I tried to find the best algorithm for managing software dependencies. I tried almost everything possible: from Perl to Ruby, from Debian to Redhat. None of the results satisfied me, only my own solution happened to work... This is just my experience of course. Then I stumbled upon ZYpp and that was it. ZYpp uses Boolean satisfiability problem solving to manage dependencies. Thanks to the hard work of Nils Adermann and Jordi Boggiano, PHP now has a good tool for managing dependencies – Composer.

Yes, PHP has better dependency management tools than other languages.

Thanks to Git, Composer, and PHP’s built-in web server, it’s easier to download/test/install a PHP project.

Want to test Symfony (using PHP5.4)?

$ composer.phar create-project symfony/framework-standard-edition

$ cd framework-standard-edition

$ ./app/console server:run

Want to test Silex?

$ composer.phar create-project fabpot/silex-skeleton

$ cd silex-skeleton

$ php -S localhost:8888 -t web/

Still don’t know Composer? You should know about it.

Browse the main Composer repository Packagist, it already has more than 1900 packages, and they have been installed millions of times in less than three months.

Next challenge: Build Composer into the next PHP version?

Cooperation

Community cooperation is the focus of this article and what I am most proud of. We're starting to see better collaboration in PHP projects, even big ones, so big that you can ignore other projects.

phpBB, Drupal, ez Publish, Symfony, and many other projects (such as phpDocumentor, PHPUnit, Behat, Zikula, Propel, Doctrine, Midgard, etc.) are all sharing code. Yes, they are competitors to each other, but they both understand that it is important to work with each other. Composer is a great way to facilitate this kind of collaboration.

The next challenge: convince more projects to join this trend.

Conclusion

Let me reiterate, PHP may not be the best programming language, and I will be the first to point out its quirks, but PHP is by far the best web platform.

http://www.bkjia.com/PHPjc/445653.htmlwww.bkjia.comtruehttp: //www.bkjia.com/PHPjc/445653.htmlTechArticleThere are many complaints about PHP, and even these complaints come from many smart people. After Jeff Atwood wrote another complaint about PHP, I thought about the good things about PHP. ...