I enjoyed Hugo Landau’s praise of PHP in The Demise of the Mildly Dynamic Website:
- PHP has the world’s simplest deployment model for web applications: copy some files to a directory. This deployment model is so simple, and so intuitively understandable, that almost anyone capable of using an FTP client could deploy a PHP application.
- Because PHP originated as a templating language, the initial behaviour of a PHP file is simply to print its contents. This means, in turn, that you can just “dip in and out” of PHP as you need it. Compare this in turn with even the simplest Perl or Python CGI script. For the latter, you’re writing a program which outputs HTML; with PHP, you’re writing HTML with some occasionally interwoven code. If a particular page doesn’t need to do anything dynamic, it needn’t contain any code at all.
- PHP scripts don’t consume any resources (persistent processes, etc.) when they’re not being used.
And PHP is a heck of a lot better today than it was back in those “Rise of PHP” years. You could do a lot worse than building in Laravel.
