Summary

Limiting PHP to the programming language is reductive. We have just seen it—it is a real ecosystem with a rich and active community, and extremely far from burying its favorite language. The developments around PHP are countless, and the language itself has evolved in the most beautiful way in recent years. The contributions of functionalities gave a real second wind to this one, allowing it to claim—still today—first place among the most used programming languages on the server side for a web application.

All this would be nothing without the explosion in the number of external libraries available for the language. You have a problem; there is a solution. We are fortunate that most external libraries are open source. Thousands of developers make available, voluntarily and free of charge, the fruit of hours, weeks, or years of work.

Making a choice from among these libraries can be difficult and challenging. It is important, even mandatory, to do...