PHP has stood the test of time. Ever since its inception, PHP has been used to develop a multitude of websites that serve a variety of purposes. PHP has steady evolved and today is a robust and reliable platform used for website development. PHP has been used to develop easy to use frameworks and content management systems.
Frameworks such as Symfony, CakePHP and CodeIgnitor power millions of websites on the internet today. Content management systems such as WordPress, Magento, Drupal and Joomla are very popular today. PHP powers millions of websites on the internet. It is considered as the backbone of the internet today. Being open source, it did not receive a lot of traction initially, but when businesses and developers noticed its potential, PHP was rapidly adopted to build various websites and web applications. The 7th version of PHP is already out and yet PHP is still the simplest of all programming languages. It is also the most popular and preferred language for developers and more and more businesses are using PHP to build their business sites.
Here’s what makes PHP such a preferred language:
- Speed – When it comes to website development, speed is one of the most important factors. A sluggish website is repulsive and visitors automatically browse away. The seventh version of PHP is known for it’s speed. It is the fastest of all the available versions.
- Error handling – PHP is known for its error handing efficiency. As PHP evolves, these error handing properties are improved and with the latest version, it gets even better. PHP 7 replaces errors with exceptions.
- Return type declaration – PHP 7 returns type declaration and allows developers to stop unwanted return values. This greatly improves the code quality. PHP 7 has 4 new type declarations including int, float, bool and string. Developers can use them to show PHP that they are waiting for those values.
- Anonymous Class – The use of anonymous class has been a great practice with JAVA and C++ developers. The use of anonymous classes greatly reduces coding time. It also reduces the code execution time. The website is thus faster and more efficient.
- Group Use Declarations – This is one of the best features that are included in PHP 7. It enables developers to import more than one class from the same namespace. The code looks cleaner and can be executed faster. The overall impact on the performance of the website is definitely positive. It also helps developers to debug the program faster.
- Support for 64 bit Windows – PHP 7 fixed the issue of 64 bit support for Windows! This makes development process easy.
So, if you are looking for reasons to upgrade to PHP 7, or if you are looking for the latest version of PHP to build your website from scratch, PHP 7 is a great place to start. You can get all the speed you require and developers also find it more appealing to write and debug a clean code.
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