Does the PHP good in 2020

Disclaimer: all of you will read in this article only the author’s opinion. You may agree or not.

This is the first article about PHP Language. Only my own opinions.

Somebody tell us “PHP is dying, you should not use it in 2020”, let me take a little discussion about it. PHP in 2015 and PHP in 2020 there are different languages.

PHP 7.4 released in November 2019.

We got new opportunities like:

• Preloading
• Typed Properties
• Short Closures
• Weak References
• Covariant Returns
• Contravariant Parameters

Preloading the good news for optimization and fast handling. We are already using this in production.

Ecosystem as is it

Around PHP exists the big ecosystem witch consists of packages manager, package libraries more than 687 million code lines were written. Many really good frameworks exist.

Everybody knows if you need something, first of all, you should visit packagist.org. Almost every task already has a solution.

About coding speed, fast problems resolving

PHP the best language if you need a system prototype. You can get MVP is the smallest time and check your theory with minimal costs. In my current job, I have made the SMS Gateway prototype which saves company clients traffic. After that, my team was made the production-ready service which replaced a prototyped-gateway service.

MVP was cost us 2 hours to think about solving the problem path and 2 hours to coding.

Low costs, fast development. I think looks good!

Frameworks

Recently for an enterprise-level application, we need to use a framework. Now you can choose one of many. You can choose Symfony 5, Laravel 6, Slim 4, Phalcon 4 and others. All of them suitable for microservices or a monolith depends on your need.

If you need a simple web application, MVC pattern most popular for a web application instead of implement CQRS, etc.

By default, PHP has blocking I/O. Swoole extension providing coroutine features.

Native language feature

Sometimes we need to build an application framework free. To resolve this task you can make your application structure.

This can be a PHP-CLI application or a PHP-FPM application. It depends on the requirements.

You can get a clean own layered-application structure based on DDD in a short time. I think this looks great.

Resume

This is the tool with his problems and shortcomings as every tool in our world but, there is a suitable tool for each task. In the same way, PHP takes his place in the programming world. @gievoi.v