6 Cases When PHP Is the Best Choice for Your Project
PHP is often denounced as old-school or not efficient enough to meet the new expectations on the market. However, the number of projects based on PHP is not decreasing. To the contrary, new PHP-based apps and web pages emerge every day and their number has grown from about 70% back in the 2010s to 80% nowadays. The point is, this language is really easy, it features a great asset of frameworks and tools that streamline the developing processes, and it is perfect for creating web content and working with databases. The complaints about its inefficiency come from areas where a very particular kind of efficiency is meant (like big IT projects or banking systems), but there are plenty of other dedicated languages and tools to fill the assumed capacity void. And here, we have compiled the list of the most efficient ways to do PHP development to get the best results. Take it as a cue and build your own successful PHP project!
- Think PHP – Think Fast And Easy User Authentication.
Whether you need a simple login and password authenticating method, or solid two-step verification, or cookies management, look no further than this language. PHP is great for generating two-step verification tokens, for opening and closing cookies-based session, and the cherry on the cake is that all these operations are made super easy to implement. PHP was intended to handle these processes well, so why look somewhere else?
- Taming of Databases.
PHP was born to tame databases and made them civil and nice to developers and users. Its early day databases are now the byword and the object of punch lines, which attests to their popularity and ubiquity. MySQL, Oracle, BerkeleyDB, SQLite, as well as NoSQL databases are perfectly maintained and protected in PHP. The application of security measures for databases is also super convenient. So when you need your app or web page to retrieve data from a database and manage it smoothly, reach for the PHP toolkit.
- Building Backend Code At The Server Side.
As you know, good development turns an app or a web page into a smooth blend of frontend and backend code elements. The frontend is what you and your users see, and the backend is where the bulk of data is stored, for example. The frontend can be done with a few simple tools like JavaScript for light dynamic pages, or it can rely on more complex tools like Angular to include more functions or create custom combinations of elements. Yet the frontend needs to interact with the backend and do it fast. Of all options, PHP backend is the best solution so far, because it was created for this purpose. No matter what frontend code is applied, PHP will lend a hand and won’t let you down on its backend side.
- Real-Time Apps.
Social networks, chatbots, games, systems of real-time monitoring like weather tracking tools become all the more popular as smartphones have become extensions of our hands and we want to do everything on the go and without delays. These apps are all operating in real-time mode, and their responsiveness needs to be high. They can be built with a variety of frameworks, including Node.JS or Angular.JS. However, when it comes to interactions with databases, errors may occur. The solution is to connect the frontend to the PHP backend. Remember that PHP was designed in particular to tame databases and to make them work no matter what. For real-time apps its databases-related capacities are unparalleled.
- REST.
No, not that rest, although it is always a good idea. REST stands here for data exchange that happens between machines, not between a machine and a human. If we speak about weather sites, they all have different ‘faces’ but provide the same sets of data. They do not ‘read’ the weather themselves. Rather, they retrieve the data in a specific machine-readable form from one site that belongs to a meteorological company and then translate it into vivid and easy-to-read information for people. For the process of inter-machine communication to happen smoothly, protocols like CSV, XML, or JSON are used, and in their turn, they are conveniently supported by PHP libraries. So, need REST? Opt for PHP.
- WordPress, Anyone?
We bet that you have used more than one site built on WordPress, and maybe in those ‘olde’ days you ran your own blog, also on WordPress. So you know how simple and easy it is to use. And yes, it is written in PHP. Actually, the majority of CMS are. And there are no signs its popularity is going to decline. New plug-in and patterns are being offered, and loads of freshly baked software for WordPress are created daily and sold or distributed as freebies. This is a good area to look into if you plan to earn something by coding without building ‘the next Facebook’. Just take some PHP code and build a nice WordPress plug-in. It is bound to be a hit.
