Serverless, ReactPHP, and Expanding Frontiers, May 2019

40 \ May 2019 \ http://www.phparch.com

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By the Numbers

PHP continues to be the dominating

force in developing web applications.

According to w3techs.com, PHP is

currently powering 79% of all websites.

Now that’s down (a little) since a few

years ago when the number used to

be 82%. However, it’s currently on the

upswing at the moment, so seems to be

just some of the central ebb & flow of

usage patterns.

On a sad note for those of us in the

community trying to push modern

PHP forward, it looks like only 31.7%

of those websites running PHP, are on

PHP 7. The majority of the rest at 67.7%

are running PHP 5 still.

One other number to note is that

33.8% of all websites currently are

running WordPress. That’s up from the

past when it was more in the 25% range.

WordPress as a platform continues to

dominate because of its ease of use and

free nature.

Anecdotally Speaking

PHP is thriving at the moment, but

there’s also always the hanging question

of “Wait, you still do PHP?” that seems

to come up, although I’ve seen less

and less of that. From all the research

that I do in my capacity of running

conferences, it seems that PHP has

slipped quietly into the realm of “That

language that companies use.” We aren’t

the hot new hip language anymore—we

haven’t been for a long time.

Instead, more and more people I

run into using PHP don’t happen to be

connected to the greater PHP commu-

nity but are just programmers who got

a job at an enterprise shop, and they

happen to use PHP at the moment. At

the same time, writing raw PHP defi-

nitely is on the down-slide. Which leads

us to:

The Big Strongholds

A majority of PHP work at the

moment centers on what I currently

consider the massive strongholds of

PHP. Given how mature of a language

we are, there isn’t a reason to sit down

and write something entirely from

scratch. Everyone is starting on an

existing foundation.

At the moment, those places are the

application-frameworks of WordPress

and Drupal, and the coding frame-

works of Laravel and Symfony. This

is definitely where the heart of PHP

beats at the moment. There are many

applications written without these, and

websites stood up daily. However, these

four bastions hold the majority of the

effort and community space at the

moment. With a few other frameworks/

applications following close behind.

The advance of technology is

based on making it fit in so that

you don’t really even notice it, so it’s

part of everyday life.

• Bill Gates

Overall

Overall? PHP is doing well and has a

long future ahead of us. We may not be

shiny anymore. However, we keep being

the workhorse of the web and continue

making amazing things happen.

Eli White is a Conference Chair for php[architect] and Vice

President of One for All Events, LLC. He also isn’t shiny and

new anymore, but keeps working away at making things

happen behind the scenes. @EliW

The State of PHP

Eli White

I’ve spent a while now working on my

seven deadly sins series of articles, and

so it’s been a while since we’ve stepped

back to look at PHP itself. Where are we

as a language, and as a community?