PHP has long been a leading programming language for web development, dating back to 1995. It has lost the spotlight in recent years to languages like Python and JavaScript. Nevertheless, a PHP specialist at PHP software provider Perforce Zend emphasizes the continued importance of the language.
“Is PHP still relevant in 2026? Short answer: yes, and it shows no signs of going anywhere,” said Matthew Weier O’Phinney, principal product manager at Perforce Zend and OpenLogic, in a Blog post from January 15. O’Phinney developed web applications on the PHP-based Zend Framework before its public release and led the open source project Zend from 2009 to 2019. According to him, PHP has been the silent workhorse of the modern web for more than thirty years. “In fact, many users interact with PHP every day without realizing it,” he said, citing PHP use in the Drupal and WordPress content management systems. Frameworks such as Laravel and Symfony also use Zend, he added. “From personal blogs to complex business systems, the use of PHP remains widespread even as newer technologies emerge and grow,” said O’Phinney.
“While it’s true that PHP usage has declined slightly in recent years, it remains the most popular choice for server-side languages by a wide margin,” O’Phinney points out. And with advances in PHP 8.x, performance is rarely a bottleneck for PHP web applications, he said. The JIT (just in time) compiler and improvements to the Zend Engine ensure that PHP handles requests efficiently with high concurrency, he added. Last November, PHP 8.5 was released, with an extension for securely parsing URIs and URLs. PHP has also proven to be highly adaptable to cloud-native and container deployments, O’Phinney added. “The language easily integrates with containerization tools like Docker, allowing teams to build lightweight, isolated PHP environments that are consistent across development, testing, and production phases.”
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