PHP Development Trends In 2023

Every year, Zend puts out a report on the state of the PHP ecosystem called the PHP Landscape Report. This report series is based on a survey of the PHP community and reveals key trends shaping the PHP world.

The Zend 2023 PHP Landscape Report this report is based on the results of an anonymous survey conducted between the months of October and December 2022. It focused primarily on how PHP development teams are working with the language, their priorities in PHP development, the versions they use and plans for upgrades, and the technologies they use in developing PHP applications. It received a total of 651 qualified responses.

Below is are several points we would like to highlight from this report.

Top PHP Application Type & Technologies

While many know of PHP due to WordPress and other content management systems (CMS), PHP has also long been a “glue” language for web applications and APIs. Developers frequently interact with other web APIs, relational databases, key-value stores, message queues, and more in order to deliver business-critical applications.

The top three categories were Services or API (66.6%), Internal Business Applications (60.5%), then Content Management (43.6%).

The focus on web APIs is to be expected, as PHP’s original target was web applications, and it
has always “spoken HTTP” at a fundamental level. The fact that so many organizations are building internal business applications speaks to the ability of PHP to adapt quickly in order to produce business value.

Top PHP Application Integrates With Which Systems

In this year’s survey, to better understand the applications and systems that PHP developers are working
with, we asked respondents to share the types of systems their PHP applications and systems integrate with.

The results showed that most respondents integrate their PHP application with a variety of systems,
including databases, APIs, and middleware. Relational databases were the top option at over 74.6%, with
web APIs in second at over 68.3%. Filesystems rounded out the top three at over 55.1% of respondents.

Where Are The Teams Deploying Their PHP Applications?

The top three deployment options were AWS (46%), on-premises (36.8%), and Google Cloud Platform (19.5%). Among respondents who selected “Other”, VPS services was the most commonly provided response.

The results, when compared to 2022 results, showed a slight change in how teams are deploying their PHP applications, with AWS overtaking on-premises as the top option, and other cloud deployment options also showing growth. On-premises deployments dipped by over 10% year over year, while AWS and Google Cloud Platform gained 6% and 5%, respectively.

Top Web Servers For PHP Teams

The top three Web Server(s) usage were Apache (57.3%), and Nginx (56.5%) then Lighttpd (9.3%)

While Apache did maintain the #1 spot year over year, the percentage of users selecting Apache went down by nearly 20%. Lighttpd, LiteSpeed, and Caddy all experienced year-over-year increases, though they didn’t represent a significant percentage of overall responses.

In Artek Global, we would like to choose Nginx over Apache because Nginx can handle the process faster than Apache, but it will also depend on the requirements and needs.

Top Development Priorities For PHP Teams

In an ideal world, engineering teams would ship software free of bugs, and focus entirely on feature development that drives business success. No team is capable of this, however, which means engineering time is always split between maintenance and new functionality. Maintenance itself can take several forms: fixing reported issues, improving performance, addressing security concerns, updating dependencies, or even making the code easier to understand and maintain via refactoring. PHP developers have a wealth of tools available to them today, ranging from powerful integrated development environments to debuggers, profiling tools, and application monitoring.

Containerization & Orchestration

Containerized deployments are quickly becoming the norm for PHP applications. Since containers provide repeatable, idempotent deployment, they are a perfect solution particularly when an application requires autoscaling. Other benefits include the ability to develop applications in conditions closely mimicking production, the ability to model all infrastructure integrations, and the ability to lock down networking between services in ways that are difficult to accomplish in traditional hosted environments.

While popular cloud platforms such as AWS provide platform-specific orchestration technologies, consumers are clearly gravitating to open-source solutions such as Kubernetes and Terraform, often combining them with other automation and provisioning tools such as Ansible and Puppet.

Artek Global agrees that container technologies are changing the world. We can use containers to make applications more portability, scalable, efficient, consistent, and DevOps-friendly. They provide developers with a powerful set of tools for building, packaging, and deploying applications in a fast, efficient, and consistent way.

PHP Version & Upgrade Statistics

PHP versions are following a three-year lifecycle, which means “two years of active support” and “an additional year of security-only support”. This lifecycle allows the language to advance on a predictable path but also leads to year-on-year churn for organizations using the language, as they need to constantly update infrastructure and test their applications against new versions.

Overall, teams using end-of-life (EOL) PHP versions represented 61.9% of all responses. When looking at this
data for companies with over 100 employees, we found that the number jumps up to 65.9%, while companies
with under 100 employees dropped to 59.4%.

In this year (2023), PHP 7.4 is already at the end of its life; it is the most popular version in this response (54.2%). We think PHP 8.0 and PHP 8.1 are the next popular trends.

What next? let’s talk about the PHP upgrade.

PHP Upgrade Challenges

While PHP strives to keep backward compatibility between versions, we have observed that each version
introduces subtle changes that have an outsized impact on applications.

When deprecations are finally removed, they can lead to applications breaking in unexpected ways. As such, we are not surprised
to see that refactoring and testing consume the bulk of time for respondents.

Final Thoughts

Exacerbating the situation this year is the fact that PHP 7 has reached its end of life with the announcement of PHP 7.4’s end of support in November 2022. Organizations that have not yet adopted PHP 8 are now faced with the need to either migrate quickly or seek out a commercial provider offering a long-term-support version of the language.

If your organization is utilizing PHP and you haven’t yet implemented containerization or orchestration techniques, it is highly recommended to invest in these areas. Although they may present challenges to learning and implementing effectively, they will result in more stable and consistent deployments, providing protection against releasing bugs to production. It is also advised to take the time to research and invest in high-quality monitoring solutions to aid in identifying production issues and their underlying causes. By combining these with infrastructure-as-code and a strong continuous integration pipeline, your organization will be better equipped to adapt quickly to PHP updates.

The 2023 PHP Landscape Report contains a wealth of additional data and analysis to explore, so I encourage those who haven’t already done so to download the report.

If you have an interest in developing PHP high-performance systems, Swoole, concurrency, and coroutines, please feel free to contact me via email at [email protected].