As a bit of proof, Slack, the messaging platform that tried to replace email, has milllions of users, all of whom connect every single day to a system who’s backend is written in PHP. If that’s not a story of how PHP can scale, then I don’t know what is. Many people cite Facebook as a good example, and although I believe Facebook probably still uses PHP in some form, I think they’ve probably moved much of their application away from PHP. But, to be honest, Facebook is a bit of a special case.,But even still, I don’t really think it’s true. It probably comes from the age old practise of using PHP directly in HTML (whish is ugly). The thing is: we really don’t do that anymore. In fact, it’s seriously frowned upon.,Why? I really don’t get where this comes from. But it’s a big one. What makes a language “enterprise ready”? How is one language more enterprise ready than another? Java is probably one of the most popular languages in the enterprise space, but it’s not because Java itself is enterprise ready. It’s because of the existance of the Java EE Platform. I’m no Java developer, so I stand to be corrected here, but from what I understand, Java EE is a platform on which enterprise applications are built. Sounds kinda like a framework, right? So maybe the question should be “is enterprise ready?”,PHP is not a one trick pony and WordPress is only one side of the PHP story. There are plenty of frameworks and packages to choose from if that’s the way you’d like to go. Laravel has been credited with “making PHP cool again”, and I have to admit that the framework is by far one of my favourites and an easy choice for me for most projects.,You can’t talk about scalability without also talking about infrastructure. If you’re hosting a WordPress blog on a simple shared hosting and you suddenly get tens of thousands of hits… well that could likely be a problem and your host is going to send you a nasty email, or at least bill you a lot more than you were expecting.,The answer to that question is for a different post entirely. The point I’m trying to make is that PHP as a language is as much “enterprise ready” as any other language. It depends entirely on how you use it.,I’m not saying that so called “beautiful languages” are bad choices, but it definitely should not be your determining factor. Java is downright ugly, yet is one of the world most popular languages. Arguing against the use of PHP because it is ugly is just silly.,Just a side note, some time ago I was a part of a small team which built and deployed an events management platform onto the internal network of one of South Africa’s foremost financial institutions (I might write something about my experiences with that). The app was written entirely in PHP and JavaScript. And with the Covid-19 pandemic in full swing, the system was under extreme pressure, yet it has handled almost all of it. We’ve had a few hiccups, but nothing that couldn’t solved quickly.,Yeah, I kinda agree. I’m not a the biggest fan of WordPress these days, but I’m also willing to admit that without WordPress we probably wouldn’t have the kind of PHP community we have today.,Blaming PHP for the misgivings of WordPress really isn’t fair. It could be argued that WordPress was a reflection of the limitations of PHP, but that was a long time ago, and the language has matured extensively since then.,I sometimes think the question of scalability is also a bit of an over exaggeration. In my 20 years of writing things in PHP, I have never had to deal with “millions of requests” per second. Not even close. The majority of us are not going to be building the next Facebook, no matter how much we like to dream about doing just that. In reality we build apps that are far more targeted. We deal with specific industries, often in specific countries and we never have to worry about dealing with more than a few hundred requests per second. For many of the projects we’re involved in, that would be large. It doesn’t mean that what we do isn’t important, it just means we don’t need to think about that sort of scale. Scaling applications to deal with millions of requests just isn’t a part of our normal day-to-day.,In the three blocks between my home and the nearest coffee shop, there are over 20 species of trees from six continents. There’s the adorably short fig tree in my neighbor’s yard, a silver tree that glistens under the sun, and a cork oak with a squishy trunk. There’s also a grapefruit tree, a row of Marina strawberry trees, a Japanese blueberry tree, and an Indian hawthorn. All live and thrive on a single street in San Francisco.,Scaling an application involves a lot more than just your language choice. There’s a lot of moving parts and I get frustrated when PHP takes the brunt of the blame. Newer versions of PHP, in the right environment and configured correctly, are more than capable of dealing with a large number of requests per second. Laravel Vapor, which is a first-party serverless platform for Laravel applications running on AWS, has some really impressive numbers.,You have to be kidding me. I’ve saved the most irritating for last. If you are selecting your tech stack based on how nice it looks, then you’re doing it wrong and you need to seriously re-evaluate your choices.,This is the only one that has maybe a thread of truth to it, but it’s more complicated than you think. In truth, PHP is able scale just fine, if you write decent code. When people say that PHP doesn’t scale they usually referring to the idea that applications written in PHP might not be able to handle very large numbers of requests (like in the millions). The thing is that is still not that simple and I think a lot of the misconception comes from WordPress, which, until recently was well known for having scalability issues.
