PHP = Modern

I was recently conversing with someone who incorrectly thought PHP development died 10 or 15 years ago using echo or print statements to output RAW HTML like it was still 1990’s technology. How wrong could that impression be.

There are MANY ways to do modern web development with PHP using many available toolkits. Comparing it to historical PHP is like saying Windows is limted by MS-DOS, correct only if you are stuck in a time-machine.

I use PHP for a lot of my web backends (along with an appropriate database like MySQL or MariaDB) but do all my web page work in EWB, and that HTML5/JavaScript communicate with PHP using JSON.

EWB writes single web page (SWP) apps that feel like local applications. Other examples of SWP apps are Gmail, Facebook, etc. The idea of repainting entire pages with server scripts went out the window ages ago.
Users love the speed of not waiting for pages to reload, apps that feel like local apps because they ARE executed locally, just in the web browser.

PHP is a good candidate for the server end because it interfaces well with databases, system libraries like libcurl, libsnmp, AI libraries, etc. It is incredibly flexible and mostly portable from Windows to Macs to Unix and Linux. And PHP 8 is much more strongly typed, which I always felt was an oversight in previous releases.