10 ‘Must-Know’ Advantages of PHP

As an open source server side scripting language, Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) is widely used by web application developers across the globe. Many developers love using the scripting language to develop powerful, dynamic and interactive web applications within a short span of time. The huge popularity of the language can be estimated from its use in developing some of the renowned business and social networking websites. If you are planning to switch to the innovative and powerful language, it is time to understand some of its key advantages.

10 Features that Make PHP Score over Other Scripting Languages

• Easy to Learn and Use: Many novice web application developers find it easier to learn PHP without putting much effort. As the PHP syntax has similarities to the C and Java, the developers, who have prior experience in writing programs in these languages, can easily migrate to the powerful scripting language. At the same time, a developer without having any prior programming experience can also learn the language after knowing HTML. The clear and easy-to-understand nature of the language makes it popular among all types of developers.

• Easy to Embed in HTML: In comparison to conventional scripting languages, PHP can be embedded into HTML in an easier and hassle-free way. Many developers even prefer learning PHP after being familiar with HTML. The easy to embed feature also help developers to use the scripting language to convert the static websites into more dynamic and engaging websites without putting any extra effort.

• Open Source and Cross Platform: PHP is also popular as an open source and cross-platform scripting language. As it is open source, a developer can use the language without paying any fees. Further, a company can hire a developer having experience in writing C and Java program to start working on its PHP project. Also, as a cross-platform scripting language, PHP works perfectly on various operating systems including Windows, Mac, Linux and UNIX.

• Superior Level of Freedom: As PHP is not operating system specific, the developers enjoy a huge amount of freedom to write code using any of the commonly used text editor. Based on your choice, you can write the code using just Notepad, or some other editors Emacs, jEdit, Bluefish and Notebook++. The no restriction on coding allows developers to develop applications at their own pace and convenience.

• Several Frameworks: Each programmer looks for options to build powerful application without writing longer lines of code. The PHP developers can develop robust application within a very short timeframe using a variety of frameworks like Symfony, Slim, Silex, Zend and Aiki. You can choose any PHP framework based on the requirements of your application. Also, each framework allows you to avail a set of benefits including code reuse, better session management, and database access libraries.

• Smooth Integration with Systems: PHP is used widely by programmers to develop a variety of web applications and websites. According to a number of reports, over 30% of the web is powered by this powerful scripting language. There are also several systems like Memcache, Pusher and MongoDB that are integrated seamlessly with PHP. So you can use the language to develop powerful and dynamic web application for clients belonging to different regions and industries.

• Instant Support: Most developers need help, answers, or tips while writing codes. As PHP is open source, a developer has option to avail the assistance of a large community of developers. You can simply initiate a web search to access the online documentation and resources for PHP. At the same time, you also have option to avail specific solutions through online forums, blogs, social media and PDF. The support makes it easier for you to get instant assistance whenever you are stuck.

• High Scalability: Along with being interactive and dynamic, most web applications also need to be scalable. After deploying a website, the organization has to enhance hosting, databases and coding to boost its performance. The flexible and easy to understand feature of PHP, makes it more scalable. You can use the scripting language to add more servers and feature to increase your cluster size.

• Convenient Access to Third-Party Tools: Most web applications try to improve user experience by using popular tools and applications developed by third-party vendors. For instance, some business applications use Google maps to help users in identifying a location. Similarly, most ecommerce websites use a variety of third-party application like shopping cart software and payment processing gateways. You can use PHP to easily access all types of third-party tools in a fast and hassle-free way.

• PHP Hosting Services: An organization can further avail several advantages by hosting a PHP application through PHP hosting. Along with being inexpensive, the PHP hosting service further effective in boosting the efficiency and performance of application developed using the scripting language.

These features help immensely in PHP application development. In addition to these features, PHP also scores over other scripting language due to its user-friendly nature. Also, the PHP community constantly works on projects to keep the language updated and dynamic enough to meet the latest trends in web application development.

If you would like to outsource php development and would like to hire a php programmer for your needs, please contact us at Mindfire Solutions.

PHP Zend: Presenting tools for the Mobile and Cloud

For any offshore industry organization, PHP turns out to be the perfect code base for swift application development and deployment. As technologies are becoming more and more mobile, and content becoming available across cloud facilities, it is highly anticipated that PHP will come up with something easy and effective for this platform too. Zend Studio 10, derived from PHP’s Zend framework, has brought in innovative tools that make room for a suitable drag- and-drop ambience within the mobile app industry. Another Zend development tool from the closet of PHP is Zend Server Gateway which serves as an API with respect to cloud facilities revolving around the Representational State Transfer or REST architecture. Before we explore these tools let us have a brief understanding of the beneficial aspects of the Zend framework.

Reasons for Popularity of the Zend Framework

Loosely coupled: The Zend Framework can be utilized in the form of a component library. This implies that one can opt for working with a single component or a group of components existing in the framework. For instance, if you need to make use of the Zend Pdf, then it is possible to do so without making use of other components available within the framework. In fact, decoupling of components is done to the greatest extent possible.

MVC constituents: MVC (Model View Controller) components are also available within the Zend framework. This enables the separation of user interface from business logic. Mapping of HTTP Requests is done to a specific function within the user land controller set. The front controller structure is also implemented.

CLI and web programming: Zend framework can be used to compose CLI scripts. Argument parsing functionality is provided by the Zend_Console_GetOpt constituent.

Documentation: The documentation of Zend Framework is exhaustive. Documentation is available in 6 languages in more than 500 pages. Along with the reference guide, online access to and downloading facility for API documentation is available.

Support: There are a number of support channels available in Zend, the official one being the mailing list, which involves active participation from Zend developers. Moreover, a plethora of unofficial forums are available online.

Value creation by Zend: Zend Server and Zend Studio constitute the platform and IDE products available from Zend. Both of these come with a community version that can be freely utilized and provide integration across Zend framework. Partnering with organizations such as Sitepen, Adobe and Google enable Zend to leverage the components of these partner companies.

Zend for the Mobile and Cloud

The capabilities of the PhoneGap mobile industry are integrated by Zend Studio ten with respect to JQuery, thereby crafting a remarkable drag-and-drop ambience for swifter development of mobile applications. For a company operating within the PHP application domain, PhoneGap is of immense help as it enables UI prototyping for Android, BlackBerry, RIM, iOS mobile and Windows Phone operating systems. Design expedient back-ends are provided ranging from cultural media to business applications.

The Zend Server Gateway offers integration of cloud facilities within the drag-and-drop ambience of Zend Studio ten facilitating convenient validation and authentication. The Zend server upgrade enables automatic deployment of applications within the cloud and ensures the availability of dashboards for monitoring the operation of the application across manifold cloud scenarios of the application. Auditing and compliance features are synchronized within the upgrade facilitating Root Cause Analysis (RCA) without making any changes to the live code. The partnership between Zend and Red Hat has led to the introduction of the PHP engine to aid the OpenShift platform. Other remarkable cloud tools that come via Zend are Zend Application Fabric and phpcloud.com.

The PHP Zend industry is advancing rapidly, bringing in cutting edge technology for PHP based network apps, thereby ensuring the implementation of the most cherished network applications within the stipulated time at economical rates. PHP application development teams can help you build projects within allocated budgets and time schedules.

If you want to hire a PHP developer for your PHP web development needs, please contact us at Mindfire Solutions.

Top 9 Amazing Facts about PHP

Business has been getting smarter over the years as a courtesy of fast technological evolution. The merits or demerits of technology tendencies can be judged by the kind of influence they have on enterprises. Trends that have no influence on the presentation of businesses in their domain go away, not ever to be glimpsed again. But the ones that help enterprises improve their profitability in more ways than proceed on to become the catalysts for change. Various software technologies have taken the business to a modernize way of representing in the web. Among the popular technologies PHP is probably the most known web development language right now. At least 20 million domains use PHP and it’s the language used on major sites such as Wikipedia and Facebook as well as in some of the world’s biggest open source projects like WordPress and Drupal.

We are well into 2013 and it has thrown up some advanced technology trends that have the potential to affect business and that too in a good way. Some amazing things happened just after the birth of PHP. It has met most of the business needs today from small to midsize and big size business.

Amazing Facts:

• PHP's abilities include outputting images, PDF files and even Flash movies generated on the fly.

• PHP can be used on all major operating systems, including Linux, Unix variants, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, RISC OS and probably others. PHP has also support for most of the web servers today.

• With PHP we can make a template with our own site. One can redesign the look of a site often, or just keep the content fresh on all the pages. By keeping all of the design code for the entire site in separate files and it can be accessible as PHP files to the same design. This means that if one makes a change, he only needs to update one file and all of your pages will change.

• If one wishes to add a Poll, PHP is the best which provides the GD library and thus help in displaying the results of the poll visually instead of just listing the results in the text.

• Hosting a Web Forum is easier with PHP now. It is a popular language to create a web forum. One can use a forum that already exists and modify it for your needs, or can write a new one from scratch. PHP will usually store forum information in a MySQL database. This allows large quantities of information to be stored and accessed quickly as required.

• PHP helps to create a page hit counter which can get the number of people visited on one's site. For a simple counter you don't even need to have a database, you can do it with just PHP using flat files.

• PHP even helps in getting information about last visited users. It can do this by storing a cookie in the user's browser. When they come back, you can read the cookie and remind them that the last time they visited was two weeks ago.

• PHP gives the ability for a company to have a dynamic presence on the web which allowed the company to conduct its business electronically, in essence having an electronic shop. Products can be advertised, sold and paid for all electronically. PHP websites can be exposed to hundreds of users around the world for almost no cost and with information being able to be changed almost instantly, the site can always be kept up to date with all the latest products to match with consumer demands.

• The attractiveness of PHP lies in its simplicity. It is very simple to understand and discover, especially for those with backgrounds in programming such as C, javascript and HTML. The language is alike to C and Perl so that anyone with a background in either C or Perl programming will feel comfortable using it.

Technology has advanced and many things are possible now with a few clicks. One can build customized websites in quicker time with PHP. With the power of technology today, businesses can understand their customers better and can initiate steps that help them build richer and more fulfilling relationships with their customers. The convergence of mobile computing, social networks and contextual services has meant that achieving customer intimacy is no longer an impossible task.

2013 will be the year for PHP which has many badly needed features which will see businesses making a perceptible shift towards implementing threat monitoring tools and data safety research teams, deployment of central management tools to enforce across the board security policies, data encryption, and more focus on cloud security. Newer versions being added with latest features getting more quality work in many countless projects, thus advancing PHP to the next level. PHP development India teams can help you build projects within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide PHP web development services. To know more about the expertise and certifications of our expert PHP developers, please visit us at Mindfire Solutions.

Top 3 Ultra-Rapid PHP Application Development Frameworks

Nowadays web development industry has been moved into Open-source application development with PHP development. It is very popular for building customized web applications. PHP applications are known for their simplicity. PHP is still being implemented the most and it has no plans of backing down. Easy it is to learn and use, in contrast to other scripting languages. To use of PHP our efficiency of web development increased and driven greater revenues for business sectors for various verticals. With PHP development one can create ultra clean and easy to maintain, enterprise quality applications.

A good PHP framework can help in building complex Rich Internet Applications quickly, with a best practice oriented approach thus saving a lot of time reusing code snippets that are already available. There are many interesting PHP frameworks available on the web. Depending on your requirements and need, one can select from a vast range of web development frameworks offered in the market. 
 
Each framework has its own style and extended choice of web application features. It shares the burden of managing web directories or files. From error and codes handling to logic authentication, you can take care of all these and others with the help of a well-designed web application framework. A PHP Framework is a basic platform that allows us to develop customized web applications quickly in lesser time. It provides structure, where building application gets easy. By using a PHP Framework, one can save loads of time, avoid repetitive code and to build applications rapidly (RAD). 
 
PHP Framework makes it easier for you to ensure this connection between database and application, one can avoid repetitive code and build an application from scratch. Operates on the Model View Controller (MVC) which is an architectural pattern featured in various popular programming languages which breaks apart your domain logic from your user interface. The domain logic is the function that handles information exchange between your database and your user interface. Therefore you're able to modify the domain logic and most importantly for designers, the user interface separately. PHP Frameworks become much clearer and easier to use with this MVC logic. 
 
PHP frameworks are useful as it eliminates repetitive coding and systemize our building process. PHP Frameworks are a powerful tool for an even more powerful programming language which helps coding in an organized and clean manner. PHP frameworks have been put into place to save time and reduce the work load. CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Symfony, Prado, Qcodo, Zend Framework, Akelos, Maintainable , Seagull, Zoop, Kohana, Blue Shoes etc. Among many PHP frameworks we need to choose the best one to suite our business specific needs.

Top 3 RAD development frameworks are :

CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining and deploying applications. It comes in built tools for form tampering protection, SQL injection prevention and XSS prevention which helps in building safe and secure applications. It has MVC conventions which guide in properly to build in richer applications. Mainly used in many blogs and websites. It makes it all the more interesting for the developers and users because flexible licensing, friendly community, localization, code generation, compatible with versions 4 and 5 of PHP, Data Sanitization, Email, Cookie, Security, Session, and Request Handling Components ,Works from any web site directory, with little to no Apache configuration involved etc. 
 
Symfony is a full-stack framework, a library of cohesive classes written in PHP5. It provides an architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster. Choosing symfony allows you to release your applications earlier, host and scale them without problem and maintain them over time with no surprise. It was originally conceived by the interactive agency Sensio Labs for the development of web sites for its own customers. Symfony was published by the agency in 2005 under MIT Open Source license and today it is among the leading frameworks available for PHP development.

Zend Framework is based on simplicity, object-oriented best practices, corporate friendly licensing and a rigorously tested agile codebase. Zend Framework is focused on building more secure, reliable, and modern Web 2.0 applications & web services and consuming widely available APIs from leading vendors like Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Flickr, as well as API providers and cataloguers like StrikeIron and ProgrammableWeb.

A great start for choosing and using the right framework that will help make sure your applications are running smoothly. A good PHP framework allows us to reduce our workload by speeding up the coding and developmental process, along with eliminating the need to code repetitively. PHP Frameworks also allows our applications to run on a more secure platform and reduces security risks. With MVC structure it enhances rapid Application development. 
 
Indian IT market is famous for open source web development; they are popular for great performance, much more reliable and easily embedded into HTML agreeable with servers like Apache. It helps effectively in providing content from web server to client. It has faster speed and better efficiency then other languages. Better versatility, reduces cost of development, maintenance and easy customization. These features attract all to PHP development. PHP development India teams can help you build projects within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide PHP website development services. To know more about the expertise and certifications of our expert PHP developers, please visit us at Mindfire Solutions.

Tabulating the Stunning PHP development benefits

As years pass by developments in the information technology world, new trendy, agile programming languages keep flourishing. Today's growing trend makes your business online and stay updated with the latest information. In order to build any customized business on the web we need to take the help of the best programming language available and that is PHP. In this competitive world we need to stand out of the crowd and build a strong customer centric website which will fetch more people. PHP being open-source builds dynamic applications at quicker time, catering different kinds of business needs.

This language can support any database including MySQL and Oracle. It can run on any operating system. It has hundreds of base functions and thousands more via extensions. PHP development is the most demanding and happening technology liked by developers. PHP can be deployed on most web servers, many operating systems and platforms.

It can be used with many relational database management systems. Most web hosting providers support PHP for use by their clients. PHP now known for rapid application development and so designed many sophisticated frameworks like Symfony, CodeIgniter, Yii Framework, CakePHP and Zend Framework etc. It has 20 million Internet domains, every much used as the server-side scripting language running on 75% of all websites whose server-side programming language is known and is the most-used open source finest software within enterprises. 
 
When it comes to designing your best website that creates the right image of your business in the minds of your clients and customers, it is only right that you go for the best option and it is none other than PHP sufficing your every business demands. It's all the more worthy because of its enhanced features like its open source, user friendly, cost effective, less time consuming, high quality procedures and process and possibly has the best coding practice and making it best for all development needs.

Top Benefits of PHP:

• Sophisticated Inbuilt PHP Code:
  PHP is an open source language that comes with inbuilt PHP codes. It has its attributes quite similar to C and Pearl. This is the reason for which it makes the understanding of PHP codes a lot easier for the PHP amateurs. This in turn comes up as a boon in programming. A person regardless of the background to which he belongs and specializes can easily understand the PHP language and play with the codes during the web development. This language is compatible with all known platforms such as windows, Linux and Mac OS X. This is a huge benefit as the making of interactive web pages comes as really easy for a PHP developer. 
   
  
• Stupendous Online Execution and Performance:
  PHP is a crowd-pleasing successful language giving dynamic service and hence packed with features that help online shopping websites. The PHP/mysql eCommerce solution helps businesses boost their sales and business revenue. Almost all businesses use business portals for setting up an online store.. It gives a beneficial solution serving the classic web sites which have wonderful performance advancements. PHP development ensures a great deal of safety and security which is what each user wishes to have in the first place.
  
  
• Greatly In Vogue for the CMS Development:
  The Content Management Systems employing the PHP language are the extremely impressive applications in the power of web development services. PHP enables a Web Developer in formulating an extensive range of content management systems that employs distinct CMS applications like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and the likes. CMS facilitates the entrepreneur in mechanizing the business processes in the best possible way. As PHP is an open source technology that does not mandate any upfront licensing payment, the developers utilize this technology for formulating a wide range of web applications to meet all the user needs.
  

Added Benefits:

• Web services offered by PHP platform are designing online forms, richer and interactive dynamic websites, messaging portals, custom apps, management solutions, online calendar, business apps, social network, content management, eCommerce development, online store and website maintenance and many more. 
   
  
• It follows all features of 'object oriented programming' (OOPS) and thus it ensures that the data is encapsulated. Regulating authentication and controlling cookies becomes easier with that. And it works with the embedded scripts.
  

It is the most loved languages across the globe and has been supported by almost every hosting company. It was born on 1995 and since then had been growing with many demanding features with newer additions and newer versions. PHP development has numerous features compared to other programming languages .Net and Java. It is useful and the most hyped technology building complex application in a simple way. It has the largest community support and is an evergreen technology. And India provides top development options if you are looking at PHP development. PHP development India teams can help you build projects within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide PHP website development services. To know more about the expertise and certifications of our expert PHP developers, please visit us at Mindfire Solutions.