After an influential developer in the open source PHP project, Nikita popov, decided to go ahead, this prompted the formation of a new foundation to lead the project: The PHP Foundation. This raises a few questions. First of all, why is PHP still a staple of the web, when other programming languages ​​and frameworks are seemingly more suited to the modern web? Second, what are the motivations of the companies that formed this new foundation?

Last week, JetBrains blogged about The PHP Foundation. JetBrains is a Czech Republic-based company that provides tools for software developers, including an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for PHP called PhpStorm. His motivation is therefore clear: he wants to make sure that PhpStorm will continue to be relevant. As for The PHP Foundation, JetBrains wrote that the goal is to be “a non-profit organization whose mission is to ensure the long life and prosperity of the PHP language”.

Among the newly announced partners for the new foundation is Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Despite some evolution towards JavaScript technologies in recent years, especially with its modular editor Gutenberg, WordPress remains very dependent on PHP. If you run a WordPress blog, you can see that the whole admin interface is made up of PHP pages (wp-admin / edit.php, etc.).

Why is PHP still so popular?

Last month, I wrote a column about why jQuery, a JavaScript library that debuted in 2006, is still incredibly popular. 76% of the top million websites are using jQuery in some way, according to BuiltWith (it’s actually down a few percentage points since this column was published). According to the same source, PHP is currently used by 36% of the first million websites – and that number has been on the decline since the middle of last year. Although interesting, PHP is most widely used among the top 10,000 websites – 49% of those sites use it.

Source: BuiltWith

Although PHP appears to be losing popularity slightly, at least when it starts to enter the long tail of websites, the technology will remain in place for many years to come. The reason for its lasting appeal is similar to that of jQuery – both are core technologies of the WordPress platform.

PHP is also widely used by other major platforms including Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg used PHP to code the original Facebook website, but nowadays the company uses a variant of PHP called Hack.

The twists and turns of PHP over 26 years

Just like jQuery, PHP is a handy and easy-to-use tool for web developers. This has always been the case, dating back to 1995 when an independent developer from Canada named Rasmus Lerdorf released the first version of Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools). At that time, PHP Tools was a small set of tools for building server-side and database-connected web applications. It was not a programming language, although Lerdorf added a scripting language to their toolset later that year.

Indeed, Lerdorf had essentially set out to create what we now call a framework – think React or Vue, minus the modern complexity. PHP tools gained traction in those early years, primarily because they were a useful set of templates and snippets that web developers could reuse. It also integrated well into HTML and was easy to connect to databases (MySQL also debuted in 1995, so PHP quickly became closely associated with it).

As Lerdorf himself noted several times over the years, what he created in 1995 and continued to work on in 1996 was a very different system than PHP today. Indeed, PHP evolved considerably after 1996 and many other influential developers helped shape its future, most notably Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans for PHP 3, which was developed in 1997 and released in June 1998. PHP 3 was “the first version that closely resembles PHP as it exists today, ”according to a detailed infographic of the first 25 years of PHP by JetBrains.

Ironically, Lerdorf always said he didn’t like programming and complaints that he is “not a real programmer”. But this must be taken with a grain of salt – how many “real programmers” have ever developed something as substantial as PHP? JetBrains seemed to recognize this in the infographic, when he said that PHP began to transform into a programming language in 1996, thanks to Lerdorf adding “built-in support for DBM, mSQL and Postgres95 databases, cookies, support for user-defined functions and much more. “

In successful businesses or web innovations, the inventor or founder often continues to provide the rationale for the technology long after they’ve gone. I think this is the case with Lerdorf. He is still the guiding spirit of PHP, even though he is no longer one of the main developers. “We cannot lose sight of what we are doing here and why we are programming,” he said at a PHP conference in 2019 (quoted by David Cassel). “We are programming to solve a problem. And I hope this is a problem that really matters. Amen to that.

I should add that Lerdorf was mentioned in the JetBrains post announcing the PHP Foundation post, as being involved in the initial “temporary administration”. A promising sign.

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I mention this whole PHP thing because some web technologies seem to have a knack for sticking around – they’re part of the web furniture, so to speak. In the case of jQuery, that hasn’t changed much over the years. It still does the job it was meant to do, and it’s still a handy JavaScript library that developers can access.

Other web technologies are constantly evolving over time – and PHP is one of them. But no matter how far it has strayed from the original 1995 version, the DNA remains the same. PHP has always been designed to be a practical and easy to use framework for web developers. Whether it’s a framework (which, by the way, is how BuiltWith classifies it) or a programming language, it doesn’t really matter. PHP runs deep in WordPress, Facebook, and many other platforms and websites – so it’s here to stay.

Unlike jQuery, PHP continues to evolve. It stays trendy, and the PHP Foundation will hopefully mean it will for many years to come.

The New Stack is a 100% subsidiary of Insight Partners, an investor in the following companies mentioned in this article: Automattic.

Main image via Pexels.