How PHP Frameworks Help in Web Development of Enterprise Software

Web development of applications in PHP opens up new opportunities for developing innovative projects in enterprises. This language has a number of advantages, including scalability and reliable community support.

The real task of any business is to achieve maximum with minimal costs and in the shortest possible time. Numbers are extremely important, and much depends on the speed of obtaining results. Trying to complete web development projects as quickly as possible, large companies look for reliable software solutions with a proven history of successful integration. But these "time-tested" solutions sometimes turn out to be more cumbersome than innovative.

Thus, business owners try to play it safe. The last thing a company leader needs is uncertainty or haste. However, the risk of missing optimal solutions is even worse. Custom web development is the first step towards a more elegant solution and creating a competitive business model.

What is Enterprise Software?

Enterprise software is typically a business management tool created for the specific needs of an organization. Unlike customer-oriented software, which is based on a marketing concept, enterprise software is often aimed at solving internal problems of a particular corporation. An enterprise solution can be a content management system (CMS), a customer relationship management tool (CRM), an enterprise resource planning system (ERP), or any other tool that facilitates the management of an organization's assets.

Enterprise software should be:

• reliable;
• secure;
• scalable;
• powerful;
• independent.

A typical enterprise solution — for example, for a medical organization — must be accessible, have a disaster recovery plan, and guarantee confidentiality to its clients. It must comply with the norms and laws of the country in which it will operate. This solution should also include features such as a real-time reporting function and an advanced monitoring tool.

Certainly, encryption at the data access level and protection of the hosting solution will be required, such as an SSL certificate, IP restrictions or blacklists, and automatic database backup. This may require complex business logic with various third-party software integrations and web development, such as a real-time messaging system, PDF reports, diagnostic tools, data import and export, LDAP or other directory access service. To access data, it may be necessary to implement additional layers to ensure redundancy and continuous data flow.

Why Web Development of Applications in PHP is Important for Enterprises

Many mistakenly believe that PHP is a simple functional language suitable only for small businesses and low user loads. But this is a misconception. In fact, web development in PHP for enterprises is constantly evolving.

A programming language is just a tool that helps develop software, but it does not create solutions. Web development teams must start with the system architecture.

Since PHP 5.0 was released in 2004 (and especially after the release of PHP 5.6 in 2014), enterprises began using web development of applications in PHP for such massive platforms as Facebook, Vimeo, and WordPress. Why did this happen? This language meets the following business requirements:

1. Development speed.
2. Scalability.
3. Support.
4. Reasonable cost.

Community, Diversity, and Speed of Web Development

Web development of applications in PHP is based on a cross-platform language with open source. Therefore, it has one of the largest support communities. Due to the large number of web developers skilled in PHP, finding specialists is not difficult. Moreover, most of them are well acquainted with other common web technologies. A typical PHP web development team is cross-functional and consists of specialists who are well-versed in CSS3, HTML5, MySQL, MongoDB, Vanilla JavaScript or JS. Professionals can apply their experience and find expert solutions.

Furthermore, with the growth of web development volumes, the same specialist who builds the server and front-end architecture can configure the production environment and handle server configurations on AWS or other hosting providers. This level of flexibility usually means faster web development and quick deployment, especially when a project must be completed under tight deadlines.

According to the annual StackOverflow survey, team specialists use 4 to 5 main programming languages, among which the most common are SQL, JavaScript (and its frameworks), and PHP.

Teams that are familiar with a large number of technologies can be flexible in the web development process. Moreover, they are better prepared for the changes that will have to be faced in the event of staff replacement. This requires careful consideration when creating various project elements, such as proposed libraries or extensions for the frontend and backend, database, and server side.

Scalability and Performance in Web Development of Applications in PHP

The biggest myth about web development of applications in PHP is that, unlike Java and .NET, the PHP language does not scale, making applications written in it unsuitable for enterprise use.

However, this is a misconception. The main overhead in web applications is associated either with network traffic or with database connections. Higher performance implies that loading will be faster or the load will be lower.

• Faster loading on the network can be achieved both on the client side and using server-side caching methods. PHP supports tools such as APC, Redis, and Memcached. They cache parts of the code or database objects and store them directly in the server's memory. From there, they are instantly loaded on the next call with virtually zero delay.
• For lower load, it is simply necessary to limit the number of all connections and requests to the database, which will dramatically increase performance. If this is not possible, distribute the workload among other servers using load balancing and achieve the same result.

Most hosting providers, such as Amazon AWS, offer load balancing with virtually no PHP server configuration. In this case, it does not matter whether the resources depend on the server. At worst, they need to be shared across all servers. Clustering mechanisms in PHP ensure fault tolerance. This means that a failure in one node does not affect the rest of the chain, and the application remains operational.

Moreover, when Facebook introduced HHVM, the infrastructure began to change. So did the understanding of the capabilities of web development of applications in PHP.

HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) improves performance and reduces load to a minimum. It converts PHP (and Hack) code during web development into bytecode through a JIT compiler, performs additional optimization, and translates everything into machine code. This reduces latency and speeds up code execution on the server.

But even without HHVM, the new PHP 8 has been improved. Certain enhancements have been made to boost performance in web development, such as a faster execution engine, native thread local storage, multithreading, and reduced memory usage. It can be argued that PHP 8 is one of the fastest server-side languages for web development. And although each developer has a subjective opinion and language choice is based on personal preferences, it cannot be denied that this version of the language is much more powerful compared to previous versions. Scalability is no longer a problem at all. Instead, the problem lies in designing the right architecture that best supports complex enterprise systems.

Web Development and Application Support

Three major CMS engines run on PHP: WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. It is unlikely that this lineup will change anytime soon. According to wordpress.com, this system powers 27% of the Internet and continues to grow, capturing new virtual territories. However, this should not be a big surprise. Business owners can take advantage of ready-made platforms that provide all the necessary tools for brand representation, marketing strategy, or e-commerce tool. And it will be cheap, fast, and reliable, since developers guarantee long-term support. Moreover, everything that is not part of the platform's core functions can be found as a plugin or extension and does not require unique web development, so for standard solutions we recommend using ready-made CMS.

Of course, WordPress and its competitors' platforms are not suitable for every business. Often there is a need for a much larger architecture combining many internal and external tools. From payment integration to communication tools with EHR or similar electronic record systems, real-time messaging, complex reporting, resource monitoring, and many other details. Nevertheless, using existing engines in web development allows you to bypass some of the resources needed when building from scratch. Moreover, they can provide a foundation for a well-organized architecture on which to start web development of reliable enterprise software.

Web development of applications in PHP can be supported by several well-known and mature frameworks that incorporate excellent architectural concepts such as dependency injection (DI), aspect-oriented programming (AOP), caching, inversion of control (IoC), transaction management, SOLID, and others. Among the most popular PHP frameworks for web development in 2021 remain Symphony, Laravel, Zend, Yii2+, Phalcon, and CakePHP, with Laravel experiencing the greatest growth in interest since 2016.

These frameworks can not only speed up web development and provide long-term support, but also actually reduce the required effort, as they provide many related components such as authorization, authentication, roles, access control, and more. This allows for a modular approach, separating business logic from all common functions, so the web development team can fully focus on the specifics of the application.

Frameworks mainly demarcate business rules and low-level details. They allow creating a well-defined code structure and automate common processes such as defining database entities, creating annotations and archives, securing all database connections and queries, and speeding up unit testing. In fairness, frameworks for web development of applications in PHP force web development teams to write good, maintainable code and follow the best coding standards. This fact, along with the huge number of good specialists in the programming community working in web development of applications in PHP — especially with Laravel — guarantees constant support and finding solutions to any complex logical problems.

If you want to create enterprise software, you most likely need a long-term solution with access to technical support. Anyone with the appropriate skill set, not just a development team, should be able to expand their knowledge in web development of applications in PHP and much more. The versatility and professionalism of developers allow for a good result. Engineers who code in multiple web languages, as well as people well-versed in a variety of technologies, can immediately move on to new projects.

Ask the Right Questions at the Initial Stage of Web Development

Right questions will allow you to obtain as much information about the business as possible. Having all the necessary data, the development team will be able to find the right solution and create the best architecture, regardless of the web development language.

Reduce Overall Costs Through Web Development of Applications in PHP

The following aspects of web development of applications in PHP lead to higher speed and reduced costs for project development:

• a large community of PHP engineers, the vast majority of whom are familiar with the additional web technologies needed for full assembly;
• a huge number of ready-made modules for direct integration;
• processing workflow (unlike Java, PHP does not require compilation and gives instant output).

So, can web development of applications in PHP save money, time, and effort? The answer is positive — definitely yes. If it is based on the right architecture and a powerful framework (for example, Laravel), web development of applications in PHP can be successful (for both enterprise and startup).

How Reliable is the Support for Web Development of Applications in PHP?

When it comes to maintenance, a team of specialists takes the possibility of long-term support seriously. The popular LTS version 5.6, released in mid-2014, was supported until 2018, followed by version 7. If the development team chooses PHP 8 now, they can count on official support from PHP representatives for this version of the language for at least five years. By the time support for the current version expires, an updated version of PHP with a similar support lifecycle will be available on the market.

LTS is a guarantee that if any vulnerabilities or errors are discovered, engineers will fix them quickly. Since there is such a huge community of PHP developers, the chances of a security bug going unnoticed for even a couple of hours are virtually nonexistent.

Moreover, thanks to PHP's excellent dependency manager — Composer — any ready-to-use component in web development, such as an authorization package or user management tool, is automatically handled when updating to a newer version of the package. Managing dependencies of external packages will no longer be a burden for the web development team. This is a great time saver that ensures stability and security of the solution in the long run.

Composer lists all packages currently used in the application, as well as their versions and dependencies on other tools. If a newer version of packages is available in public repositories, Composer automatically updates the dependency list and retrieves the new versions without risk of breaking the application.

How Web Development of Applications in PHP Helps Teams Acquire New Skills

The collective level of knowledge of the web development team in the chosen framework will determine the project outcome (of course, excluding any external circumstances).