Why use PHP

[beingchinmay]

Put simply, when it comes to developing dynamic Web sites, PHP is better, faster, and easier to learn than the alternatives. What you get with PHP is excellent performance, a tight integration with nearly every database available, stability, portability, and a nearly limitless feature set due to its extendibility. All of this comes at no cost (PHP is open
source) and with a very manageable learning curve. PHP is one of the best marriages I’ve ever seen between the ease with which beginning programmers can start using it and the ability for more advanced programmers to do everything they require .

Finally, the proof is in the pudding: PHP has seen an exponential growth in use since its inception, overtaking ASP as the most popular scripting language being used today. It’s the most requested module for Apache (the most-used Web server), and by the time this book hits the shelves, PHP will be on nearly 25 million domains.

Of course, you might assume that I, as the author of a book on PHP (several, actually), have a biased opinion. Although not nearly to the same extent as PHP, I’ve also developed sites using Java Server Pages (JSP), Ruby on Rails (RoR), and ASP.NET. Each has its pluses and minuses, but PHP is the technology I always return to. You might hear that it doesn’t perform or scale as well as other technologies, but Yahoo! handles over 3.5 billion hits per day using PHP (yes, billion). You might also wonder how secure PHP is. But security isn’t in the language;