Cloud computing loves almost all programming languages, whether they are compiled or scripted.
It is part of what is so attractive for cloud engineers. This time we look at one of the most
controversial when it comes to opinions about programming - PHP. We'll start by going back
in time, way back to the early days of the public internet in 1994, where animated gifs were still
three years away and cat videos on YouTube, more than a decade off existing. It is here that we
find Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf, writing Common Gateway Interface programs in C
to power his personal homepage. Extending this work to run web forms and connect to databases,
he coined the term "Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter", PHP/FI or just PHP. And this
is the part where I tell you that the first major implementations of the language were however, let
me quote the good man Lerdorf instead. "I don't know how to stop it. There was never any intent to
write a programming language. I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language."
PHP was never conceived to be a language on its own. However, in the past three decades, it has
come to power some of the largest websites such as Facebook, WordPress, Etsy, Wikipedia and Flickr.
PHP is optimized and tuned for web development, which is why cloud platforms love it. You can
build secure, high-performing, and scalable web applications in PHP.
To help you get started with your PHP application, there are many programming frameworks such as
Laravel, Symfony, and CodeIgniter. These frameworks help with securing your application,
reusing templates for common tasks and features, as well as enforce architecture patents,
all things that make you look good to the boss. I promise. It doesn't matter what kind of web
project you are building: a website, a content management system, an online store,
image processing, or data collection. PHP will excel at all of them. There are lots
of integrated development environments, or IDEs, to help you develop amazing PHP applications too.
The most popular are PHPStorm, Sublime Text, and Atom, but there are many others.
PHP is a scripting language like JavaScript, Python or Ruby. This means the PHP code runs on
any server that has a PHP interpreter installed. While many languages have specific purposes they
are designed for, PHP is known as general purpose. You can build almost any type of web application,
it is quick to do so, and it runs everywhere. PHP comes with a vast number of frameworks, libraries,
and pre-made code segments that you can use at your own leisure...or peril. Remember at
the top of the episode I said this is one of the most controversial programming languages? As easy
as it is to get started with PHP and create your worldwide web domination, it is equally easy to
make a real mess of it too. Statements and code segments that would throw warnings and errors
in other languages can be valid in PHP, and create results that no one expected. However, despite the
controversy, that is also one of the strengths as you can do very efficient and clever things with
PHP, such as creating some of the best performing web applications on the internet. Also, all major
cloud platforms support PHP as a primary language, and it is used in millions of cloud applications.
Why should you learn PHP then? Well first, it's a very mature and popular language.
The 2021 Stack Overflow Developer Survey showed 22% of professional developers use
PHP in their day job. PHP is free to use and open source with most of the tools needed
also free. PHP is platform-independent working on Unix, Linux, Windows, and Mac.
You can use PHP for any modern web application and it is fast, really fast. It is considered to be
one of the fastest web languages around. I mean, why else would the social media behemoth Facebook,
as well as our favorite open encyclopedia Wikipedia, use PHP? Surely that means it's good
right? Did you enjoy this video? Would you like to see more?
Be sure to leave a like on the video and let us know in the comments what other
cloud programming languages you would like us to cover. Except Jelly. Code golf is not for us.