Web programming is a rapidly developing area now, along with the constant spread of the Internet in overall life and the quick transition online of the businesses that recently relied on offline. Due to this, developers are facing the question of choosing the right language and programming environment since the prospects and the future of any project largely depend on this choice. Java, C, Perl, Ruby, Clojure, Go – there a lot of options to choose from today. Here we consider PHP and NodeJS and try to compare them in terms of performance, convenience for developers, and future prospects.
- PHP. Originally it was supposed to be a preprocessor for hypertext pages; therefore, it can be easily integrated into HTML code. PHP is very popular around the world; most of the websites are written in it.
- Node.js is a JavaScript and V8 engine from Google. Node.js is gaining traction and is heavily used by companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and PayPal.
Assessment and comparison of PHP and NodeJS
When we evaluate the productivity of these two technologies on the example of the simplest “Hello world,” there is a slight advantage of PHP due to the low entry threshold, although the results are displayed almost the same, and they do not have a significant difference.
Comparing the set of developer tools, NodeJS, with its npm, bower, and grunt, can be given a small advantage, although PHP has a huge history, and you can easily find any documentation, tons of useful materials, etc. NodeJS technology is newer, so it still has everything ahead.
It is not entirely correct to consider PHP and Node.js from an environment point of view. NodeJS has good productivity, scalability, JSON compatibility, low resource use, thanks to which NodeJS can be used in IoT.
As for the integration issues, we can count it as a draw, since on the one hand, PHP, due to its history, has integration with different technologies, but on the other hand, Node.js works great with JSON, which means it interacts with the NoSQL database.
As far as hosting and deployment issues are concerned, PHP is more likely to go ahead, again, because of its long history. In many cases, all you need to do is create a file with the .php extension and insert the code between <?php and?>, upload the file to the server, specify the path to this file in the address bar. That won’t work with Node.js.
In terms of overall performance, Node.js as a platform with high performance, low latency of applications inevitably takes away its market share, but PHP now has a powerful position and will definitely be in demand in the market in the near future.
In any case, in choosing a programming language and platform, it is better to choose based on your requirements and requests rather than general comparisons.