PHP at Scale #1
Surprise – my Newsletter is back with a new format, revolving around mature usage of PHP language and its frameworks. The aim is to provide you with good practices, techniques, and tools, that allow the software you build to scale freely. If you like well-crafted software products and hate poor software design – this newsletter is just for you! I plan to send a release once a month.
In the first edition, I will focus on PHP's place in the modern web development scene. The reason for focusing on this is that PHP will soon turn 30 years old!
Is PHP still relevant in 2024?
This is a question that even PHP developers might ask themselves. Many new languages and frameworks are appealing. Although it might seem that modern JS frameworks take over the market, it’s not really the case. PHP might not be the most commonly selected language for new projects, but it still makes sense for lots of projects. Piotr dives into some more detailed statistics, numbers, and things like the overall ecosystem.
Is PHP terrible? (spoiler — it isn’t)
This video recently became quite popular. You probably won’t learn too much about PHP if you are coding with it, but some comments and thoughts from people who are or aren’t familiar with modern PHP are interesting to know.
PHP introduced some awesome changes in the last releases, but still, 8.4 introduces even more changes! I'm interested to see what the PHP haters from the video above will have to say about the property hooks🤣.
PHP Version stats in July 2024
Comparison of PHP Versions used, although, from my experience, some projects are still running on PHP 5. Such older PHP projects don’t use composer, and as such are not covered in the statistics. Anyway, this tells us quite well how modern PHP projects adopt new PHP releases.
In case you are stuck with some older PHP version, you can have a look at the following two articles we wrote:
Modernization of legacy applications
This might give you some good ideas on how to convince your business to start the modernization steps. It also covers links to some technical posts that we wrote some years ago, but that are still valid when it comes to the approaches you can take.
I summarized the changes in 8.x a year ago, and you might want to have a look if you still have to code on older versions. Attributes, named arguments, enums, read-only properties and constructor property promotion make day-to-day work with PHP a lot easier. The code is also easier to read, so investing in such changes will pay off sooner than later.
Why is this newsletter for me?
If you are passionate about well-crafted software products and despise poor software design, this newsletter is for you! With a focus on mature PHP usage, best practices, and effective tools, you'll gain valuable insights and techniques to enhance your PHP projects and keep your skills up to date.
I hope you found something helpful or inspiring here, don’t forget to leave feedback in response to that mail, your suggestions will be greatly appreciated and might impact the next edition.
May thy software be mature :)
Michał Kurzeja
CTO at Accesto