PHP is a very common general purpose programming language, best suited for web development and highly adapted from large companies and community.

Two weeks ago, PHP 8 was finally ready and released for production, we were looking for this moment a long time ago, we started immediately migrate our projects, we updated our development, staging and production environments for PHP 8, and started to upgrade our frameworks.

We managed to deploy PHP 8 for many projects in productions, along with implementing many other features for security and reliability, keeping our system on cutting edge technologies, all within Two weeks!

PHP... The new Rise!

Back in 1994, PHP started as smart tags for programmable tasks, within 10 years, PHP version 5 was released in 2004 with great community adoption, massive number of websites were built or converted from other languages to PHP.

Later on... as PHP 6 started to be built, there was a critical core change, making it much slower in performance and not much new features, the focus was shifted to Unicode support.

Sadly, PHP 6 took about 10 years in development and still has so much to solve, many developers lose interest and moved on to other new languages, finally PHP 6 didn't see the light, and it was eventually abandoned.

A new major version was rewritten and released as PHP 7 in 2015, it focused on performance, about 100% faster, and has a few new features too, it had to be done as fast as possible to compensate the wasted time on PHP 6.

PHP 7 was a success, but a little too late to celebrate.

Finally, PHP 8 was released last month with many new concepts and features, it has most modern languages techniques, very simple and clear coding syntax ... and more!

As PHP is rapidly advancing now, it has the qualification to rule again, it has the known power where other languages hit the technical limits, we are also very excited for the under cooking features, we rely only on techs that will control the future. 

Why to upgrade to PHP 8?

Simply put? For continuity.

If any software's code is too old, it'll be hard to maintain and harder to implement new features, eventually it'll be abandoned all together in searching for an alternative solution.

Keeping code up to date, has so many benefits, not only better security and performance, but it'll make it much simpler code over time, more stable and reliable, and more importantly: faster to develop when it's needed.

As for us, we still support 10+ years old projects, by keeping them up to date always, this was never a challenge task for us, and in many cases we do it as a basic step without hesitation.

We enjoy to keep stuff up to date and explore new techs and solutions, this is part of our daily routine here at ArchitWeb, you are always welcome to join.