December 27, 2010 07:03
In terms of development 2010 was a mixed year for Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), the popular general-purpose scripting language. According to our analysis the three most pertinent PHP developments of 2010, are as under:
HipHop PHP compiler by Facebook
Facebook is currently the largest PHP based website on the web. It is also one of the largest websites in the world with over 500 million active users. Such volumes bring unique problems to Facebook’s PHP scripting, especially with regard to multi-threading support.
In order to counter the limitations of PHP Facebook developed an ingenious compiler called HipHop PHP, which was released as open source in early 2010.
In essence, HipHop PHP converts PHP applications into C++. The investment enabled Facebook developers to compile C++ code into native machine code, and run them faster and more efficiently than PHP Zend Engine.
Apart from its obvious advantages, HipHop PHP also works as a standalone web server, capable of implementing whole PHP applications functionalities and run HTTP requests in a multi-threaded manner. The standalone web server offers immense advantages over Apache and Zend Engine based PHP environments, which consumes more memory and processor resources.
The only disadvantage of HipHop PHP is that it’s slow, and takes hours and even days to compile PHP web applications and achieve optimization. Therefore, HipHop PHP is only recommended for large and busy production environments.
PHP for Android
Android accounted for 25.5% of worldwide Smartphone sales with over 20.5 million handsets sold in Q3 2010 along. These figures make Google’s Android the fastest emerging player on the International mobile and tablet PC market.
Even though Android applications are predominantly Java based, it is possible to develop applications using scripting languages such as PHP.
Earlier this year, Irontec, the Spanish application development firm, made it possible to run conventional applications on Android devices using PHP code through its Android for PHP project.
PHP 6 out, PHP 5.4 in
Another major development was the termination of the PHP 6 project in March, 2010. PHP 6 was envisaged to create native Unicode support when manipulating of text strings. The ambitious project was cancelled in favor of further development of PHP 5.4. In fact a few weeks ago, development of PHP 5.4 also hit a stumbling block due to a lack of consensus.
Despites the mixed results, 2011 holds great promise for PHP development. Who knows maybe PHP 5.4 may revolutionize the industry and give the most popular web development language a new lease on life!
