Chronicling the PHP Journey

The inception, rise and continual progress of PHP have constituted a phenomenal journey. It has seen its share of falls, obstacles and has still risen over all that as a preferred web application development technology for companies providing offshore software outsourcing. The demand to hire dedicated PHP developers is on the rise with each passing day as is the need for a capable PHP development company to conceive and deploy stable and robust applications. Here, we try to chronicle this very journey into eras; as a primer for newbies, or for nostalgia’s sake for the ardent PHP supporter.

• The OOP and Design Pattern Era
On 29th June, 2003, PHP 5.0.0 was launched followed by the GA release on 13th July, 2004. This release saw the adoption of best practices for elements like objects, inheritance, and encapsulation that were an integral part of the object-oriented architecture of PHP. Design patterns were also used.

• The Security Awareness Era
During this phase many eminent personalities published papers and books on the security issues in PHP and how it affected development of web applications. There was a strong push to focus on this aspect and towards finding a resolution. The Suhosin extension was released that is a part of the Hardened-PHP project.

• The Rise of the Frameworks Era
The wider application of OOPs-based coding and adoption of design patterns led to the increasing use of MVC (Model View Controller) architectures. This gave rise to frameworks like CakePHP, CodeIgniter and Symfony that today are a favorite across developer communities.

• The Era of Standardization
The rise of a variety of frameworks also meant countless pieces of reusable code all following, sometimes the same or different patterns. Community standards like PSR-0, PSR-1, and PSR-2 were launched. Code started to be divided into components that were reusable across frameworks due to the PHP base. The GitHub repositories are a prime example of this.

• The Testing Era
This is the current era where the developer community has matured and started to adopt intelligent standardized techniques in favor of bad coding practices like use of XSS, CSRF, and SQL injection. Code is being rigorously tested to weed out bugs and anomalies, and the test themselves are being automated.

We are a PHP development company specializing in offshore software outsourcing services. We firmly believe that as PHP community we are growing and moving in the right direction. Our pool of PHP Zend developers and programmers from other frameworks are primed to enter the new era of the PHP lifecycle. You can hire dedicated PHP developers from us who can leverage the advantages of PHP in a cost-effective manner for building your web application.