According to the TIOBE Programming Community Index, PHP is the most popular programming
language after C/C++ and Java.1 Gartner predicts that dynamic programming languages will be
critical to the success of many next-generation application development efforts and sees PHP as one
of the strongest representatives of this type of programming language.2 Since the beginning, PHP
was designed for web application development and was likely one of the driving forces behind the
dot-com boom at the turn of the millennium. Since then, PHP has matured to a general-purpose
programming language that supports both procedural and object-oriented programming. In the
past, subjects such as performance, scalability, and security were hot in the PHP community. In
recent years, however, architecture and quality are getting more attention. In our consulting practice,
we see more enterprises that want to modernize their PHP-based software and to base their
development processes on agile values. The modernization of a code base is usually driven by a
migration from PHP4 to PHP5 or by the introduction of a framework to standardize development.
Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that a plethora of PHP frameworks exists. All these
frameworks want to help with solving recurring use cases and the standardization of application
development. Dynamic and static testing techniques as well as automated builds and continuous
integration are no longer alien concepts to PHP developers. Especially in enterprise-
