Ask HN: Anyone still using PHP to build side projects or webapps | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Anyone still using PHP to build side projects or webapps

31 pointsmr_o4730 comments

Hello HN,

I’m always curious to learn PHP and eventually build projects. I would love to hear if anyone still using it

PHP is still the leading server-side language and it's not even close. 3/4 of the websites you visit everyday are powered by PHP in some form. I would argue that's the perfect server-side language to start solo on anything web-related for the foreseeable future. And if you'll ever need to scale up, there's no shortage of skilled PHP developers for hire. The language just keeps getting better, frameworks like Laravel and Symfony are high quality and battle-tested, most of the issues you might encounter are already documented all over the internet. Continuous learning is a reality for this profession but the "cult of the new" attitude in tech often leads aspiring developers into an endless quest for the perfect tool at the expense of gaining practical experience. Point being, PHP is faaar from dead. If you live in Europe, a solid knowledge of PHP and either Laravel or Symfony will open many doors.

> 3/4 of the websites you visit everyday are powered by PHP in some form

Do you have a source for this stats?

https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_langua...

Yes. Lots. It moves slowly (read: stable) and reliably.

It doesn't have the toxicity of rust nor the constant changes of JS. It doesn't claim to make the world a better place either. It just does what it does well and leaves it at that.

I'll second this. It's not sexy, it'll never be sexy. But sometimes you just don't have time to fuck around. In a lot of cases I'm willing to compromise UX for being able to drop a few files on a server and have things mostly "just work".

I don't use it for huge projects. I don't use it regularly. But it's a tool that has helped me build quick solutions to smaller problems and I keep in my belt because it's still more ubiquitous than any alternative.

Rather off-topic question: but what makes rust toxic in your opinion?

Not the person you are asking a response from, but any 'new hotness' tends to attract people whose motivations create drama.

I don't have any specific gripe with Rust, but I am totally keeping an eye on it from a safe distance and letting time work it all out.

In the meantime, there are nice, predictable tools to build with that don't seem so high stakes.

Thank you, you're right. I was thinking later that "toxic" was the wrong word; it has a lot of baggage. I wish I would have changed it before the editing window expired.

I think "infighting" or "divisive" are better options, given the past month or two. Hardly a week goes by without rust drama (which has little to do with the actual language and more to do with the community/leadership). The ecosystem is so new that the foundation hasn't been set yet. It's an infant learning to walk, so things will change quickly and drastically.

This is not unique to rust by any means, of course, but just the growing pains of any project.

Absolutely, it's still my go-to for building web apps.

I've had a (now) 7-figure ARR platform running happily on PHP/CodeIgniter since 2013, and create any new apps with PHP/Laravel. Laravel's ecosystem and community is just terrific, and it's the perfect backend for VueJS which I increasingly use these days.

PHP just does what it says on the tin. It's easy to install and configure, has a great package manager in Composer, and the performance gains over the last few years have been superb.

I use PHP with Laravel for my day job and it’s been fun. There’s a learning curve of how things are structured and done but I think it has been rewarding overall.

PHP + Laravel

Been using the Laravel framework since 2013.

Apps for fortune 500, NFL Teams, Grocery Chains lots of big and small companies.

Built a funded startup on Laravel since 2021.

I'm free for consulting engagements HN username @ gmail

laracasts.com (Learn Laravel) forge.laracasts.com (Spin up and deploy to AWS/Digital Ocean) spark.laracasts.com (SaaS Billing in a box) envoyer (zero down time deployments)

Livewire + Alpine js (similar to Hotwire in Rails) Inertia js

Great ecosystem and community.

I just took a job as a Laravel dev. I was previously a C#/.Net dev before that. Not making any claims about one being better than the other, but you're right about the ecosystem and the community. It's been great and I've been surprised how quickly I've become productive working in this new ecosystem.

Same experience. I'be been mostly a JavaScript/node and Python/Django dev for over a decade. Recently worked on a few projects with Laravel and its the best experience I've ever had.

YES! I'm using PHP to build my Search Engine for Kids Activities (http://twkids.app) and its been great!

I love PHP as there's no other language that provides the same simplicity and immediacy of results. I tried learning multiple frameworks but it was just too overwhelming and complicated. With PHP, its very easy to just get started as you can mix it right into your html.

I just learned the basics on http://w3schools.com and just started working on my project (http://twkids.app) right away. I think the best way to learn is to just build something real. Then just Google your questions along the way.

Good Luck!

I think one of the reasons that PHP initially got a bad rap here years ago is that one of the simplest documentation sources online, W3schools, initially had some code examples that were obviously insecure. If I remember right, it was putting raw user-submitted text directly in the database query or something like that without escaping it in any way.

PHP code in the wild can be really awful or perfectly great.

Yes. It was the first web language I learned and I haven't had a reason to switch to something else. I tried learning nodeJS and django but I didn't like how much setup was required to get a page up.

Yes! PHP + Laravel combo is an amazing recipe for building web projects quickly.

I am. I recently built a crm / crm builder called IceburgCRM, check it out.

https://github.com/iceburgcrm/iceburgcrm

The combination of Laravel / vue / tailwinds is so powerful. In some ways I hope others don't catch on or I'll lose my advantage but I feel guilty when I watch others struggle in other ecosystems with problems that have been solved.

Yes.

I'm using it because it's easy to read, easy to write and runs almost everywhere.

But it doesn't support multithreading. This is good and not so good for scaling. Then i found this: https://github.com/krakjoe/parallel and it solve many problems for me.

Yesterday I found myself using PHP again after many years. It feels like being in Alice's wonderland. Much doesn't make sense, but it is quite fun when it does what you expect. The quirkiness of arrays is just amazing, being either simple objects or arrays depending on how you feel. The world would be poorer without it.

Yes. I'm definitely old school and it's a great language if you don't want to use frameworks or other cruft, basically powerful. It's very portable, stable, and fun to work with.

Yes I used PHP when writing this site https://nationalhdtrally.com/

Yeah lots, lack of dependancy issues or having to deal with package managers when trying to deploy something quickly or after not touching it for a while is refreshing

Yes. Run a low 7 figure saas on php and laravel. Solid.

Do you administer servers or host it somewhere that manages all that?

We use AWS, DO and Cloudflare mostly. Self managed I guess

Yes. PHP is always the pre-processor of all my sites. It's powerful, straight forward, and extremely stable.

Schools have been paying me for my PHP webapp for 15 years. Maybe they still will be in 2038 :-)

Yes. Using it for a EdTech MVP at the moment.

I think it was this one photograph that did for PHP

    https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-php-singularity/

It must have been submitted here a thousand times, so I'll leave it as a comment.

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