The year 2004 can be remembered for many things: NASA’s space exploration projects of Mars and Jupiter, the release of the movie Spider-Man 2 starring Tobey Maguire and Alfred Molina, and the US Federal Elections. It is also known for being the foundation of Facebook, the site that has redefined social media and the word ‘friend’. If you are a millennial, your Facebook account would have seen every version from the very first user interface to the updated one. And since 2004, another thing has remained unchanged: Facebook’s programming language, PHP.

Old is gold

PHP, or Hypertext Preprocessor, is a platform-independent, open-source scripting language that is mainly known for generating dynamic page content. If you plan to create a website, you would want to make it more interesting and interactive than static, wouldn’t you? That is precisely why you must use PHP web development for your projects.

It remains the most reliable and popular programming language for web development, preferred by over 75% of websites. According to Zend.com, 59% use PHP for business-critical applications, 81% for APIs, and 41% for the backend of mobile applications. Altamira.ai, citing data by W3Techs, notes that 78.8% of websites are using PHP for their server side. PHP’s attributes of scalability, high speed, security, and cost-efficiency continue to be growth drivers.

It adds that the hourly rates of PHP developers are 15% less expensive than that of Python developers or Ruby developers. It means PHP developers are easier to hire.

On the shoulders of giants

PHP is as old as Pulp Fiction, and just like the movie, it can be considered a classic. Facebook is not the only website that uses PHP. Another giant in the World Wide Web, a database that contains over 4 billion words as of today, the best friend of students and the arch nemesis of teachers, Wikipedia, too, uses PHP as its programming language. WordPress, the go-to platform for bloggers, uses it as well. Such sites can be accessed across all platforms, and PHP provides flexibility.

Pick and choose

A major advantage of PHP programming is that it’s an open-source language. It means the language is not proprietary; it can be modified in a manner that is open to the public.

This makes PHP development easier to learn, practice, and apply. If you want to hire PHP developers or PHP programmers, consider the following:

Ø Innate curiosity and a great eye for detail.

Ø Excellent problem-solving skills.

Ø Ability to connect the dots and apply learned skills across various platforms.

Ø A healthy respect for resources, especially time.

It’s imperative to hire dedicated PHP developers to have the desired output.

Leave it to the experts

If PHP is an open-sourced language which is easy to learn, why outsource the programming process? Why should you hire PHP programmers? Would you rather do it yourself? Wrong. It would be a penny-wise but pound-foolish move not to hire experts for a platform that works on PHP. That’s because a skilled PHP programmer will use his/her expertise to work in sync with other languages to produce a result that has compatibility and combinability.

What does a PHP programmer do?

The job description for a developer includes:

Ø Writing the source code for the website.

Ø Testing the code across multiple platforms for compatibility.

Ø Troubleshooting the code by identifying and resolving bugs.

Ø Constantly updating the code to sync it with the updates of the platform.

But even the top-rated, best PHP programmers pour over pages and pages of code, constantly tweaking and debugging it.

A fly in the ointment

So, there are a few downsides to using PHP. Data security is a critical feature that needs to be implemented and PHP tends to fall just a bit short here. And although PHP is dynamic, it’s not that effective in handling multiple features at a time. Thus, it’s essential to hire PHP experts who are knowledgeable and experienced.

However, from 30 vulnerabilities in 2018 to four in 2022, PHP has vastly improved its security features, gradually working its way back into gaining a stronghold in programming.

The iconic line of Alfred Molina’s character in Spider-Man 2, “The power of the Sun… in the palm of my hand”, can be analogous to smartphones and the relative power it bestows upon us. Today, a smartphone with an internet connection is all that is needed to leapfrog into technology. But mobile applications need the right programming language too that’s interactive, flexible, user-friendly, compatible with cloud services, and platform-independent. And this is where PHP scores.

You might want to hire PHP programmers to create a robust and future-ready web application. If you need experience and skills rolled into one, you must contact us here at SDI. Get in touch with us to give your mobile application or website the much-needed flare it deserves. Call us at +1.408.621.8481 or drop us an email at team@sdi.la.