Top 5 reasons to choose PHP for web development in 2017

Hypertext Preprocessor/PHP is an open source server side scripting language used to create dynamic website pages.
Here are top 5 reasons to choose PHP for web development in 2017.

1) Equipped with the latest features
The immediate availability of PHP 7.1.0 is announced with several improvements and inclusion of new features such as

• Nullable types
• Iterable pseudo-type
• Void return type
• Class constant visibility modifiers
• Catching multiple exceptions types
• Square bracket syntax for list() and the ability to specify keys in list()

These features make PHP even more expedient and well-suited for web development in the times to come.

2) Open Source, Free, and User-friendly
As compared to the other programming languages, PHP is rather easy to learn. This is mainly because its syntax is based on the languages such as C and Perl.
Some scripting language companies impose charges for the usage of their codes. PHP, on the other hand, is completely free of cost, being an open source web language. So, as a part of the open source movement, almost all the small and big companies, these days, are using PHP for web development. This trend is going to be even more prevalent into the year 2017.

3) Compatible to all the OS and Servers
PHP runs on various platforms such as Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X etc. and it is compatible with almost all local servers used in this day and age, such as Apache, IIS etc.

4) Includes multiple PHP frameworks:
There are lots of frameworks available in PHP today such as Codelgniter , CakePHP, Zend, Magento, Joomla, PEAR, Laravel, Symfony and so on. The availability of these multiple frameworks in PHP helps us to quickly build application and website that incorporate a variety of different features. These frameworks also impart security and speed to our application development process.

Features related to PHP based frameworks

MVC coding pattern: Today almost all the frameworks follow the MVC pattern. This pattern separating the (data) Model from the Controller (which pulls data from the model to give to the view) from the View (what the user sees).
A well-developed MVC system lets a front-end developer and a back-end developer to work simultaneously and on a common system without any of the parties having to interfere, share or edit the files each one is working on
Object Oriented Programming: Object-Oriented Programming is a programming methodology that employs classes and objects. It helps simplify the process of software development and maintenance with the help of its concepts such as Class, Object, Inheritance, Polymorphism, Abstraction, Encapsulation etc.
The basic Object Oriented Programming functionality was first of all added in PHP 3 and it got improved in PHP 4, whereas PHP 5 introduced private and protected member variables and methods, along with abstract classes, final classes, abstract methods and final. At present, almost all the features related to OOP have been added to PHP, which has made it even more advanced, powerful and secured.

5) Security and Cross Platform:
The predefined function set of PHP supports several trusted data encryption options. Therefore, a lot of third party applications can be used to secure our data. Security being of the utmost importance for any application, this is a critical attribute when it comes to making a choice of the language for application development.

These and many more are the reasons why developers will continue to use PHP as the language of choice for a majority of applications built in the year 2017.