Is PHP still a viable choice to build a massive app like Facebook?

Question

Much has changed since 2003/2004 when Wordpress and Facebook were started. If you were starting Facebook today, knowing in hindsight the functionality and scale required, would you choose PHP (today)? Why or why not? If not, what would you choose as the basis for a massive, interactive, multi-facetted application like Facebook?

I know this is somewhat of a subjective question and would rightly require more details about requirements, etc., but I think it's a suitable question - is PHP as viable today as it was six years ago and in hindsight, would you have built Facebook with PHP then and now?

Answer 1

is PHP as viable today as it was six years ago

It is even better and stronger today.

would you have built Facebook with PHP then and now?

Definitely, it is more robust now than before.

Have a look at this video to know why facebook chose PHP and still loving it and contributing stuff like HipHop:

• Facebook: Science and the Social Graph

Answer 2

PHP is still a viable choice, it's just a mater of using it in the right way to do what you need to do.

There is no wrong language to build big application. You would be surprised to learn that GMail is entirely coded in Javascript.

Answer 3

is PHP as viable today as it was six years ago -- I think you phrased that as if PHP got worse over time, which isn't true.

PHP has got better, with performance boosts (HipHop being released by Facebook helped), new libraries for things like MongoDB, namespaces (despite the idiotic \), and nice frameworks like Symfony.

So yes, PHP is viable and always was.

That doesn't mean it is best of course. Java might be better for some websites, PHP for others. And the language isn't always the most crucial issue, because you can always throw more servers to counter PHP's slowness compared to Java. Also consider how easy it is to hire good developers in the area who know that language well, etc.

Answer 4

Is it viable? Yes it is. Obviously there are some quite large sites that use it.

Is it the best option? It depends on a large number of factors. The two things that steer me away from php are:

• In my experience, people write harder to read and maintain PHP code, than in some other languages.
• In my opinion, languages that use the JVM (Java, JRuby, Scala, etc...) make it easier/simpler scale easier with less effort and less code complexity.

Answer 5

To be honest, PHP is a mess. There are million reasons for it and I take it that most people who use PHP will agree with me. If you look under the hood (ie: PHP's source code) you will shake your head and facepalm quite frequently.

In my opinion the language is too newbie-friendly (was built with this purpose) and too forgiving.

• Can PHP be used to build large scale websites? Maybe.
  Facebook uses PHP, but a modified version of it.

• Will it be taken as seriously as Java and .NET by enterprises? Time will tell.

Answer 6

Facebook does very little more than update and read from a database so php is still a valid choice. But if you're building something that needs to build some kind of complex custom data structure and keep it in memory, I think you'd be better off using something like scala or another language that doesn't have to reprocess everything with every page refresh.

My biggest problem with php (5.3 at least...) is not the ugly syntax, nor the unwieldly, inconsistent giant function list. I'm just getting really fed up with the statelessness and rebuilding everything with every click.