Popularity of PHP ‘just keeps growing’

More companies than ever are said to be turning to the PHP scripting technology when it comes to creating solutions for use in their web servers. Therefore, if you're looking to create a website, it's likely that the technology is going to be high on your list of priorities, at least if recent figures from internet monitoring firm NetCraft are anything to go by.
According to its most recent statistics from January this year, PHP was found on 244 million sites, equating to 39 per cent of domains studied in its Web Server Survey. Of these, 78% use Linux as these platform, while 8% run on FreeBSD and windows accounts for 7% of PHP users.

Range of PHP features

But why is PHP continuing to have such strong success among web servers? The most recent major version of the solution, PHP 5, has been around since 2004 and uses the Zend Engine, which offers a high level of performance and includes features to support HTTP sessions, more web servers and output buffering.
Its also very easy to get started with programming in PHP, which attracts a wide range of developers from hobbyists to professionals at some of the world's largest firms.
If you're using some of the most popular web applications, such as WordPress, osCommerce or Magento, you'll find these include PHP technology. In fact, these tools - along with Joomla, Drupal and Zencart - were found to be in use on 32 million websites last month.

Be aware of security

However, if you're using PHP, you need to be wary, as it has been suggested the platform is starting to become a victim of its own success. Because it attracts so many inexperienced programmers due to its ease of use, a large number of insecure applications are being created.
This presents a huge opportunity for criminals as there is a large and attractive attack surface for them to target.
"Netcraft's anti-phishing services find wave upon wave of phishing attacks hosted on compromised PHP applications and the US National Vulnerability Database contains several thousand unique vulnerabilities that relate either to PHP itself, or to applications written in PHP," it was stated.