Started in the year 1995, PHP is one of the most popular server-side scripting languages and with the introduction of PHP 7, it completely brings new evolution in web development. Today, a big segment of the “server side website development industry” is dominated by PHP. Besides, many popular sites like Wikipedia and Facebook as well as CMSs like WordPress, Magento, Drupal, and Joomla are built on PHP.

Now these days, a question “Is PHP dying or not” has become a moot point among web developers. Many people think that due to the arrival of newer programming languages like ruby, mean stack, python, lua, etc. PHP’s popularity is diminishing slowly. In this article, we will discuss whether or not PHP language is dying with the help of statistics because stats don’t tell lie!!!

Stay Informed- 10 Open Source Tools which make PHP popular

PHP Usage Statistics till January 2016

A significant percentage of sites are already built and still building on php. Let’s have a look at server-side language surveys given by w3techs:

  • Most popular server-side programming languages:

 

Langusges Used Mostly

Here you can see that PHP is used by 81.7% of all the websites whose server-side programming language is known.

  • Fastest growing server-side programming languages since 1 December 2015:

  • Here are statistics of percentage of websites using different CMS:

  • Following report shows the historical trends in the usage of server-side languages since January 2015:

 

According to the above mentioned stats, it is clear that:

  • PHP is the most used and popular server-side scripting language and its usage is increasing every day.
  • PHP is used by many websites but with lower traffic than other server-side languages.
  • Perl, Python, Ruby, Javascript, and ColdFusion are used by a few sites but with high traffic.
  • PHP based Content Management Systems usage is increasing.

  • PHP Comparison with Ruby and Python:

Here we are comparing PHP with its biggest competitors: Ruby and Pythons using an informative infographics:

 

 

What is reason behind continuous popularity of PHP?

There are many reasons behind it, some of them are:

Simple to update

It is quite simple to update a PHP website and updates are prompt too. As PHP is a server side scripting language, its updates will be done from the server side, and not from the client side; therefore, it is safer. Besides, its updates will not be influenced by any browser setting.

PHP libraries

You will find php libraries in abundance to cope with the functionality of blogging pages, shopping carts, and CMSs. These libraries are keeping php alive and kicking. They help to make object-oriented programming effortless by offering a standard library of interfaces to the web developers. The most popular libraries of php are Zend, CodeIgniter, Symfony, etc. With the help of these libraries, you can easily perform following tasks:

  • Handling error and debug php codes.
  • Offering simple and user-friendly API.
  • Quick and hassle free integration.
  • Support for multiple caching methods.
  • Ready-to-use functions for working with web services.
  • Error display with syntax highlighting.

Ample Documentation

A programming language, containing comprehensive documentation support, will certainly be every developer’s choice. There are numerous PHP documentations accessible online together with document generators. Popular content management platforms for instance WordPress take advantage of customized documentation schema. Normally the documented elements are:

  • Classes and their properties.
  • Requires and includes.
  • File headers.
  • Hooks (actions and filters).
  • Functions and class methods.
  • Inline comments.

PHP Experts Availability- PHP professionals are too many in number and they provide maintenance or support related help. This specific facet of php enables users and site admins to get assistance swiftly every time they encounter any technical snag.

Conclusion:

It’s just a rumour that PHP is dying. PHP is quite popular and widely used programming language and it’ll not fade easily. Although there are many competitors of PHP, this language is highly demanded and popular in developing web applications.