Skip to content

5. Javascript vs PHP

Conduct internet research on both PHP and JavaScript. Compare and contrast these programming languages. As part of your response, include a discussion on performance, portability, functionality, adoption, and the application areas for which each is best suited.

Solution

PHP and Javascript are both popular scripting languages, and considered modern as both of them originated in the 1990s; both works very well with HTML and CSS, and both are used in web development. as they are scripting languages, they are both interpreted and weakly and dynamically typed, which makes them easier to learn and use. However, there are many differences between them, and each one of them is better suited for different applications.

PHP was created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf under the name of Personal Home Page tools which was -at that time- a set of CGIs written in C (PHP Manual, n.d) and since then it being famous for server side scripting. Javascript was created in 1995 by Brendan Eich, it was originally embedded in web browsers, but now it is used in many other applications (including server side scripting).

For fare comparison, we will compare Node.js (which is a Javascript runtime that works on servers) with PHP; as there is no point in comparing Javascript in the browser with PHP, as they are used for different purposes.

Performance

According to (Brar et al, 2021), NodeJs (Javascript) performs better than PHP for io-intensive and concurrent applications, while PHP performs better for small applications with small requests. This is reasonable as NodeJs is asynchronous, which makes it better for serving io requests as the main thread is not blocked while waiting for the io operation to finish, while PHP is synchronous, which allows it to respond to every request as soon as it is received, and while requests are small, it will finish them faster and move to the next one.

Portability

According to (Gillis, 2023), Portability is the ability do run a program on a different OS that the one that was created on with minimal work. As it the case for most scripting languages, as long as their interpreter is installed on the target machine, the code can run with minimal work.

However, PHP does exist in every operating system by default, and PHP backed servers like Nginx and Apache are available on every OS by default; while Javascript originally was implemented in the browser, thus, you may need to have a browser installed; plus client-side JS is different from Server-side JS (NodeJs), and you can not run them interchangeably i; also NodeJs is not available with operating systems by default, and you need to install it. Thus, I would say that PHP is more portable than Javascript.

Functionality

PHP’s standard library has hundreds (or even more) of functions that are available without any installation, plus it supports Web protocols, database access (relational) and many other features natively; while Javascript’s standard library is very small, and you usually depend on third party libraries for almost everything.

If we consider functionality as what the language itself can do, then PHP is more functional than Javascript; however, if we consider functionality as what developers do with the language, then Javascript is more functional than PHP, as it runs on both client and server side applications.

Adoption

According to (Romanyuk, 2020), PHP is used by 79% of all websites on the internet, while Javascript is used by 69% of all developers word wide. Thus both of them are very popular, however, it is rarely that new applications are written in PHP, as more modern languages are used instead, and PHP is used for maintaining legacy applications.

Application Areas

PHP is used for server side Scripting (websites), Content Management systems (WordPress, Joomla, Durpal), Web frameworks (Laravel, Symfony, CodeIgniter). Javascript is used for client side scripting (websites), server side scripting (NodeJs), mobile applications (React Native), desktop applications (Electron), and many other applications.

References