PHP Advantage
- Performance
- Portability(Platform Independent)
- Ease Of Use
- Open Source
- Third-Party Application Support
- Community Support
Performance
Portability
PHP is available for UNIX, MICROSOFT WINDOWS, MAC OS, and OS/2. PHP Programs are portable between platforms.
As a result, a PHP application developed on, say, Windows will typically run on UNIX without any significant issues.
This ability to easily undertake cross-platform development is a valuable one, especially when operating in a multi platform corporate environment or when trying to address multiple market segments.
Ease Of Use
Its syntax is clear and consistent, and it comes with exhaustive documentation for the 5000+ functions included with the core distributions.
This significantly reduces the learning curve for both novice and experienced programmers, and it’s one of the reasons that PHP is favored as a rapid prototyping tool for Web-based applications.
Open Source
PHP is an open source project – the language is developed by a worldwide team of volunteers who make its source code freely available on the Web, and it may be used without payment of licensing fees or investments in expensive hardware or software .
This reduces software development costs without affecting either flexibility or reliability. The open-source nature of the code further means that any developer, anywhere , can inspect the code tree, spit errors, and suggest possible fixes, this produces a stable, robust product wherein bugs, once discovered, are rapidly resolved – sometimes within a few hours of discovery !.
Third-Party Application Support
One of PHP’s Strengths has historically been its support for a wide range of different databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server.
PHP 5.3 Supports more than fifteen different database engines, and it includes a common API for database access.
XML support makes it easy to read and write XML documents though they were native PHP data structures, access XML node collections using Xpath, and transform XML into other formats with XSLT style sheets.