Cloud native, container-ready PHP

Building PHP apps and microservices for containers and high availability

PHP is the language that everyone loves to hate. It was the first language many of us used to build web apps (including myself!), but it’s fallen out of favors with developers. There is plenty of reason behind that, and most criticism is, or at least was, justifiable: PHP 5 suffered from multiple design and performance issues, had various inconsistencies, lacked any Unicode support, etc.

However, it’s 2019, and this is not your dad’s PHP. PHP 7 is a robust language that can be used to build web applications really fast. Not only it lets developers build web apps in little time, but the interpreter is significantly more performing than it used to be. Phoronix found PHP 7.3 to be almost three times faster than PHP 5.6, with real-world benchmarks using popular applications showing similar results.

Despite the antipathy some carry for PHP, it’s still widely used, with 26% of developers saying they use PHP in the 2019 StackOverflow survey. You’ll find them working inside companies building both internal line-of-business applications and external-facing websites, including greenfield ones, and working as consultants. In the last year I’ve met many different companies, from high-growth startups to Fortune 500’s, that are building apps of all kinds with PHP. If you’re still curious, you might find Alexander Katrompas’s controversial piece “Java will kill your startup. PHP will save it.” an…