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  1. Benefits of PHP

    Peter on July 15th, 2010

    Tags: , , , ,

    If you are wondering whether to choose PHP to develop your next website in and want to know what benefits PHP has over other languages, then this article is for you. I’ve compiled a list of reasons why PHP is so great and the benefits using PHP can bring. Most of them can be boiled down to a time / cost saving theme.

    So here you have it, 15 unbeatable benefits of PHP…

    Free – Like Totally Free

    You can’t get a better price tag for the language. PHP is completely free to use, free to download, free to distribute. The actual language has zero upfront costs and zero ongoing costs

    Royalty Free

    PHP is a royalty free license. This means that you don’t have to pay anyone to use it and no one can demand a fee to use it later on. Infact, using the language has no direct costs at all.

    Free From Restrictive Licenses

    There are no restrictive licenses detailing what you can and can’t do with the language, anything goes, you can even fork the language yourself and create your own version of PHP. You can let others download it from your site, you can use it for personal or commercial purposes, it can be used in any country and for any application you want. That’s some serious flexibility when you compare it to proprietary languages like Java and ASP.NET!

    Massively Reduces Your Server Bills

    While PHP can run on your Windows based server, it’s mostly designed to run on Linux and Apache, which are both open source software which have zero upfront costs and zero ongoing costs – you even get future updates free of charge. This can cut your server maintenance bills to a fraction of what you might be paying for your Windows servers (which will include on going maintenance and upgrade costs).

    Mature Code

    PHP has been actively developed for over 15 years, which makes it the same age as many languages seen as ‘commercial’ like Java, ColdFusion and ASP.NET. Just like these other languages, PHP is a proven technology but without the costs.

    Consistently Updated

    The PHP language is kept up to date by a team of global experts who ensure that the language is always relevant to the requirements of todays websites. In 2009 alone there were 3 major updates to the language and there have been 2 major updates so far in 2010. If you choose to develop your next site using PHP you can sleep well knowing that you’re not going to be left with an abandoned language.

    Works With A Number of Databases

    While most people know that PHP can work with mySQL (another open source language which keeps your costs down), it can also work with a number of ‘enterprise’ databases like Oracle OCI8, MSSQL and IBM DB2 so even if you want to migrate just the programming language to PHP to reduce your costs, you don’t need to spend any more money transferring your database to another platform.

    Very Easy To Learn

    The basics of PHP are very easy to learn. Agriya can take a college fresher and with no prior experience in coding we can get them up to speed on client projects within 3 months. There are not many other languages that have that kind of pickup time!

    Huge Amounts of Free Professional Integrated Developer Environments

    An Integrated Developer Environment (or IDE for short) is a piece of desktop software that gives a developer all the tools they require to develop a project. An IDE can be anything that is as simple as Notepad all the way up to Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010. PHP has dozens of fantastic open source IDE’s to help make your job as a programmer much easier. Even if you are a business, this can benefit you because you don’t have to spend money on expensive software just to let your programmers do their work! This is also true if you outsource your development to a company like Agriya, we don’t have to spend money on IDE’s or keep spending money to upgrade to the latest version.

    Runs On Over 90% of Web Servers

    To be honest, we’d say that PHP runs on more than 99% of Web Servers since it works on just about every operating system available, but we like to err on the side of caution :)

    Proven Technology

    PHP is a 15 year old language built specifically for the Internet. It is a proven technology and used by the number one visited website in the world: Facebook. In the top 20 websites ranked by traffic, four websites use PHP. Other notable sites include Wikipedia, Yahoo, Digg, Flickr and WordPress. All of these are proof that PHP isn’t a language for the small business or for businesses looking to save money.

    Thousands of Support Businesses

    All around the world there are tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of web development companies who can provide support, training and maintenance for your PHP driven website. These companies are experts in PHP can help with all your support requirements. Agriya is one of these companies with over 200 PHP developers and 10 years of experience, many companies rely on Agriya to keep their websites up and functioning correctly.

    Hundreds of Thousands of PHP Developers

    Since PHP is so easy to learn there are hundreds of thousands of PHP Developers who can work with you to build, maintain and improve your PHP driven website. While you could hire a freelancer to help you on as and when required, many businesses choose to have a higher level of support by taking out a retainer contract with Agriya which guarantees a developer can work on any issue at a moments notice. If you choose PHP you know that you can get professional backup and support whenever you need it.

    Huge Database of Ready Made, Royalty Free Classes

    PHP is an open language and it inspires many other people to be just as generous with their time. There are now thousands of code snippets freely available on the Internet that help do certain functions or provide a more optimized way of doing things. With so much help, advice and code examples available for free (and even free for commercial use), even if a developer gets stuck, a quick Google search is likely to give dozens of solutions to a problem. Reusable code also makes for faster development – cutting your costs if you are outsourcing your web development to a company like Agriya.

    Ready Made Frameworks

    Keeping with the spirit of open source and free unrestricted distribution, there are many PHP frameworks available that take care of many of the regular functions like member management, admin back end, search function, content management etc. which allows the php developer to focus on building the site your requirements rather than re-creating code over and over again. Just like all the code libraries, these PHP frameworks like Cake PHP, Code Igniter and Symphony reduce the amount of time it takes to build your website, hence reducing your costs even further.

    15 Fantastic Benefits of PHP

    So there you have it. Conclusive evidence that PHP beats just about everything else out there. Or am I wrong? Or maybe I’ve missed some blindingly obvious PHP benefits. If so, tell me in the comments and I’ll be sure to reply.

    If you’re convinced enough that you want to do your next project in PHP, then Agriya has a number of very talented PHP web developers who I’m sure would love to work on your project!

    Oh, and by the way, incase you are wondering what PHP stands for, when Rasmus Lerdorf first developed the language back in the 90′s, he said it stood for Personal Home-Page. However, since then the language has grown up and it is now referred to as PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. Rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 15th, 2010 at 12:36 am and is filed under Webmaster Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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