What PHP Is Today

A server-side language that grew up

PHP is a general-purpose scripting language designed for the web. A web server hands each HTTP request to PHP, which runs your script, produces a response (usually HTML or JSON) and then throws away all state at the end of the request: the shared-nothing model. That makes PHP simple to deploy and scale horizontally, because no request depends on memory left by another. PHP powers a large share of websites, including WordPress, Wikipedia and many e-commerce platforms, and modern frameworks such as Laravel and Symfony are widely used for new applications. Forget old reputations: since PHP 7 (2015), performance roughly doubled, and the PHP 8 series added a JIT compiler, union types, named arguments, match, enums, readonly properties, first-class callables, typed class constants and, in PHP 8.4, property hooks and asymmetric visibility. Each version gets two years of active support plus security fixes, so production code should run on a currently supported 8.x release. Package management is handled by Composer, and coding standards by the PHP-FIG PSR recommendations.

Request in, response out, state discarded

Each request starts fresh, runs the script and discards its memory when the response is sent.

A small modern PHP script

Strict types, typed functions and string interpolation.

<?php
declare(strict_types=1);

function greet(string $name, int $hour): string
{
    $part = match (true) {
        $hour < 12 => 'morning',
        $hour < 17 => 'afternoon',
        default    => 'evening',
    };
    return "Good {$part}, {$name}!";
}

echo greet('Asha', (int) date('G')), PHP_EOL;

// run from the terminal:  php hello.php

Always target a supported version

Unsupported PHP versions receive no security fixes. Check the official supported-versions page when starting a project and plan upgrades yearly; modern tooling (Rector, PHPStan) makes them much easier than they used to be.

Quick check: What does PHP's shared-nothing model mean?

• Each request starts with fresh state, which is discarded when the request ends
• All requests share one global memory space
• PHP cannot use databases
• PHP runs only on one CPU core