If you are using PHP 7.x for your side-project or main product, what has been your experience?<p>- has speed of performance ever been an issue?<p>- how easy have your found it to deploy (and keep up-to-date) PHP apps on the server<p>Overall, do you recommend PHP 7.x for new web projects? Your thoughts appreciated. Thank you.
I would highly recommend PHP for quick web development. We've been using it for all our sites and it's such a breeze to develop using it. We've never had any performance issues either (in my experience they are always more on the db end)<p>I'll highly recommend that you spend some time learning composer first. That is a must for any serious php development.<p>Then there are optional things you can learn like a framework like laravel, symfony, etc. My personal opinion is to stay away from it since I have found that a router is mostly all you need to get started quickly. Often times the headache to configure and debug the framework far exceeds the utility of it. So my own personal preference is to just use composer and a router and native PHP. Keeps things simple, easy to debug and super easy to deploy. But YMMV.
I'm currently using it for creating specific components for two customer projects. With Java, JavaScript, TypeScript and Ruby (for scripts) being my usual go-to languages, I'm not a huge fan of PHP but I'd say PHP 7 fares quite well.<p>It's reasonably fast. Though not part of the core language, PHPUnit is really good, as is the PHP support in IntelliJ IDEA (or PhpStorm, JetBrains' dedicated PHP offering).<p>If PHP is your main language or if for some reason PHP is required by your environment (e.g. if the target platform for your software are run-of-the-mill virtual servers) then PHP 7 absolutely is a good choice for new projects.
I still haven't found a language that lets me get a very basic website up and running faster than PHP.<p>I don't care too much for the syntax but if you just want to put up a simple page with server-side logic in as quick a time as possible then its as good as most.
PHP < 7.1 goes EOL by the end of the year.
<a href="http://php.net/supported-versions.php" rel="nofollow">http://php.net/supported-versions.php</a><p>So it's not a choice it's a requirement
I have a few decent-sized systems in different languages (PHP, Elixir, Go).<p>Six of one, half-dozen of the other if you ask me.<p>Almost any of the big ones will do, so stop sharpening your pencils, pick one, and get to work.
Speed of PHP 7 is much improved, it's way faster than 5, and fast enough for any app (Facebook runs on a flavor of PHP)<p>I use the Laravel Framework on PHP 7, Laravel makes PHP nice to work with. Laravel is as enjoyable as Rails, sure you miss Ruby but Laravel keeps development fun. If you are doing a project in PHP use Laravel.<p>I use forge.laravel.com to spin up servers and do deployments. It saves a ton of time and is definitely worth it. You could use it for any PHP project not just Laravel. There is also envoyer for zero downtime deployments. You setup Forge to pull code from from your Github/Bitbucket.<p>Forge is really amazing you can register a new domain, create a new Laravel project, and have it live on the web in 10 minutes. You can also add Lets Encrypt SSL certs right from the forge dashboard. Same for setting up an existing project from scratch it's fast to create a new droplet for an existing project.<p>If you are using Laravel I would recommend updating your apps as new versions of Laravel are released. Each update is pretty painless but if you wait to update doing them all at one time to get to the latest version can take some time.<p>There are lots of great time saving Laravel packages out there most require you to keep Laravel close to the latest release so it's worth staying up to date for the packages. Plus each release of Laravel always has nice additions to the framework.
I use PHP still, using Laravel. So far I enjoy it. Definitely a pleasure to use. My web apps are used by at most a hundred people throughout the month, so performance won’t be an issue.<p>Deployment with Laravel is a breeze. I don’t use any of their deployment utilities though like Forge.<p>I came back to PHP. Used it back in what feels like the Stone Age. Then went through Rails when it was the new hotness. Switched to mobile and desktop development. Was behind when I needed a web project done, and knew I could fall back to my PHP skills faster than Ruby. Tried out Laravel and have been pretty happy since.
I wouldn't recommend PHP, but there is nothing wrong with it, especially not if you're good at it. Django is more productive, and react, graphql + Apollo and prisma is better in production, but really, if you're good at PHP then PHP is fine.<p>I wouldn't worry about it not being the fastest tech, the fact is that if it's more productive, then it's often more cost-efficient. Iron is so cheap, that if you need to spend 1-2 weeks extra on development, then you'll be able to pay for your servers for several hundreds of years until a faster tech becomes more cost-effective than something that deploys faster.
PHP7 is really fast and performance won't be an issue. It's usually another bottleneck, like the database that kills your performance.<p>Laravel is highly recommended these days. For even more performance you should check out PhalconPHP (<a href="https://phalconphp.com/en/" rel="nofollow">https://phalconphp.com/en/</a>). But still - I'd go with the Laravel ecosystem.
1) performance: it depends on your case.
2) deploying: easy as uploading something via FTP.<p>I suggest you to use a good IDE (Atom or PHPStorm) and maybe learn a good framework like Symfony, or it would become unmanteinable quickly.
I'd recommend considering alternative options to PHP, in other projects I have found it hard to maintain over a longer period and things got messy very fast, even when using frameworks.<p>Also, in my opinion, it's not a very nice language at all.