In today’s world, your website isn’t just mere online catalogue but an important element of your marketing strategy. Whenever individuals get to know about you, their first response is to look up your website. Hence, this can be just the perfect complementing tool for your other marketing media.
Take for example; you launched a Newspaper advertising campaign. While you would have given your contact details there, not everyone would be so interested to immediately call or mail you. Most people would want to know more about you, and telephone / mail can be limiting at times. That is when they would visit your website and extract all the information about you from there.
Moreover, if one’s business is reliant on one’s website (like an Ecommerce store and social networking sites) then the emphasis on intriguing websites escalates all the more. Not only should the website be visually appealing, but it must be robust as well. Its functionalities should be user friendly and must have some other necessary features too. However, there are times when people avoid getting a robust website developed. This might be either because of some cost constraint or also because of the lack of knowledge they have in the field.
If gurus in the field of web development have to be believed, the use of an ideal scripting language is imperative. This can not only add robustness but also make the development process cost effective, at times. A robust language can bring with it a range of other advantages too. Most recent trends suggest that PHP tops the list of the preferred scripting languages by developers. It is prompt, robust and cost efficient.
Introduction to PHP
PHP is a server side scripting language. For anyone who belongs to the sphere of web development, PHP is one of the preferred choices of scripting languages. The language was created way back in the year 1995, and it was then called ‘Personal Home Page’. With time, though, it came to be renamed and is now known as PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. If one was to delve further into the history of this scripting language, one would realize that its original objective was to support the designing of dynamic yet interactive web pages. However, with the progression of time, things have advanced, and it is now being used for the development of web based applications too. Such transition has been due to the enhancement of features that have been introduced with PHP, from time to time.
There are many benefits that PHP proposes. Following is a brief account of the same:
- By the virtue of being an open source scripting language, it assists in bringing down the overall cost of the project. This can be helpful, especially during times of recession when people are being made to cut corners to make ends meet.
- From what the expert developers in the field say, PHP is highly user friendly too. When compared with some of the other languages as C, ASP or even ASP.net, PHP can be considered to be simpler to use and execute.
- This scripting language also helps in cutting down on the overall development time. This is firstly because of its ease of use. Secondly, because of the large community of PHP, you can promptly find solutions to problems that you might face during the process of development.
- It can work well with all major operating systems. Given that web users are dispersed across various browsers today, this feature can be helpful.
- It is directly embedded into HTML coding. This makes the life of developers simpler and they can breathe easy about the process of development.
PHP Frameworks
If you are involved in PHP development, you would know about the various frameworks that are available. These coding structures and methods can simplify the development process. If there is a specific requirement that one has, the right framework can be chosen to add an element of robustness and success to the process. In the above sentence, the phrase ‘right framework’ is very important. This is because there are numerous frameworks that are available, and all of them have their own unique approach and benefits for developers. It is the prerogative of the developers to choose that particular framework which can best suit the need.
Once the right PHP framework has been chosen, though, you will be able to explore many advantages. These include:
- Quicker Development
- Standardized Application Architecture
- Code Compatibility
- Easy Debugging
- Code Modification Functionality
- Online Help
- ……..many others.
Below mentioned are some of the highly acclaimed PHP frameworks. This list has been compiled on the basis of market sense and conversations with industry experts.
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