PHP language still relevant, advocate insists

A longtime leading programming language for web development dating back to 1995, PHP has lost the spotlight to languages such as Python and JavaScript in recent years. Nonetheless, a PHP specialist at PHP software vendor Perforce Zend is stressing 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 January 15 blog post. O’Phinney developed web applications on the PHP-based Zend Framework even before its public release and led the Zend open-source project from 2009 to 2019. PHP, he said, has been the silent workhorse of the modern web for more than three decades. “In fact, many users are interacting with PHP every day without realizing it,” he said, citing PHP usage in the Drupal and WordPress content management systems. Frameworks such as Laravel and Symfony also use Zend, he added. “From personal blogs to complex enterprise systems, PHP’s usage remains widespread, even as newer technologies emerge and grow,” O’Phinney said.

“While it is 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 stressed. And with advancements 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 high-concurrency requests efficiently, he added. This past November saw the release of PHP 8.5, featuring an extension for securely parsing URIs and URLs. PHP also has proven itself highly adaptable to cloud-native and containerized deployment, O’Phinney added. “The language easily integrates with containerization tools like Docker, empowering teams to build lightweight, isolated PHP environments that are consistent across development, testing, and production stages.”

O’Phinney also examined PHP matchups with other languages including Python and Java. “If your web application relies heavily on real-time data processing, predictive analytics, or ML models, Python is likely the better choice,” he said. But Python frameworks such as Django and Flask do not inherently outperform PHP in standard web-serving tasks, said O’Phinney. Java, meanwhile, remains a popular PHP alternative for massive, complex enterprise-grade systems, he said. “However, Java development is typically slower and more resource-intensive than PHP development,” he said.

In this month’s Tiobe and Pypl indexes of programming language popularity, PHP ranked 15th and seventh, respectively. Python ranked first and Java third in both indexes.