Why php is popular in the web

Posted on December 6, 2007
Filed Under php

PHP is popular because it’s relatively easy to learn and relatively cheap to develop web projects.And in the other side, its a open source technology and development cost is lower than the other technologies like java and dot net.

PHP’s three key advantages over competing technologies:

1. Designed for the Web - PHP has built-in features to handle heavily trafficked sites and to simplify common Web programming tasks.

2. Ease of Use - Companies gain enhanced productivity of development teams and significantly reduced time-to-market of mission critical web applications.

3. Open Source - Collaborative development leads to rapid technology advancement, superior code quality, a massive library of prewritten code, and comprehensive developer support and documentation.

You can view the popularity of PHP from here - Popularity of PHP.

According to a Netcraft survey published in April 2002, PHP is now being used by over 24% of the sites on the Internet out of the 37.6 million web sites reported worldwide (http://www.netcraft.com/Survey/index-200204.html), PHP is running on over 9 million sites and continues to grow at an explosive rate. Over the past two years PHP has averaged a 6.5% monthly growth rate.

If you were a small software developer creating a web based software package for sale at a price point less than $350, which platform would you pick to maximize your potential market?

There is a network effect that drives end user demand for PHP. Each new killer app available on PHP makes the whole platform more attractive, which draws in new apps. The whole cycle will draw in more and more PHP programmers.

The Hotscripts.com Java ad management software category has 4 entries, one sponsored costing $699. Meanwhile, the PHP Ad management software category has 105 entries, three sponsored all less than $100. If you were a small site owner looking to choose a platform for your site, which do you think it would be short sighted to select?

Popularity: 2% [?]

If you like this post then please subscribe to my full RSS feed . You can also subscribe by email and have new posts sent directly to your inbox.And, You can also follow me on twitter at http://twitter.com/roshanbh.

» Zend framework is the most popular PHP framework
» Which is the best JavaScript and Ajax Framework ?
» Firebug and Google Toolbar was not working for me in Firefox 3
» Get the IT magazines, journals and white paper at free of cost

Comments

3 Responses to “Why php is popular in the web”

Robert on December 19th, 2007 4:51 pm

Are you serious? There is only one real reason why PHP is so popular and that is because of its ease of maintenance for the hosting company.

Yes, it is easy to learn, but few languages aren’t. As for code quality, you ask any professional software developer to compare code quality across the board of PHP to whatever and they will likely fall out of their chair laughing. While it has nothing to do with the language, it is a well known fact that PHP apps are in general some of the most poorly written pieces of software ever.

Cost of development is relative to the cost of the developer. The time it takes me to build a PHP app is longer than if I were to build it in Java, solely because I know Java better, not because PHP is cheaper. Same could be said for Ruby for that matter.
Roshan on December 19th, 2007 6:16 pm

Well robert!! Are you sure that PHP is so popular because of the hosting companies or its popularity which compell hosting company to support PHP.

Furthermore, If somebody can’t write clean and quality code in PHP then it is the fault of that particular programmer, not of PHP.

And finally you’ve to accept the fact that the lines of JSP code of the member registration process will be relatively larger than PHP code because of being static type to PHP which is a dynamic type.
Amr on December 20th, 2007 11:57 am

yes, PHP is the best for web ,I’m just missing the beauty of namespaces found in Java and .NET