PHP Turns 30: Language and Ecosystem Are Stronger Than Ever

This month marks the 30th anniversary of PHP being released to the world. To find out how PHP has evolved over the years, its technical improvements over the past decade, and the importance of PHP frameworks like Laravel and Symfony, I spoke to PHP core developer Derick Rethans.

Rethans has been a PHP developer for 25 years and he first contributed to the project in 2001. He’s currently a core developer at the PHP Foundation, the non-profit organization that manages the PHP open source project. The PHP Foundation was launched in November 2021 by a coalition of companies including JetBrains, Automattic, Zend, Laravel, and Acquia (the custodian of Drupal).

PHP isn’t the only programming language celebrating 30 years of existence in 2025. Java and JavaScript also debuted in 1995 (Java was launched just a couple of weeks before PHP). But arguably PHP has undergone the most transformations of those three languages over the past few decades. We’re now up to version 8.4 of PHP, but as Rethans pointed out, it’s “worlds apart” from PHP 1.0. Even PHP 4, released in May 2000, is much different than the current version.

PHP 8.4 is “so much better to use, so much easier to use, so much easier to reason about code…”
– Derick Rethans, PHP core developer

“PHP 4 with PHP 8 is almost not comparable,” he said. “It’s like, if your last experience with PHP is PHP 4 — and even PHP 5 — then if you look at the language now, you probably will recognize it, but it is such a totally different language. It’s so much better to use, so much easier to use, so much easier to reason about code if you’re reading it, and things like that. So you can’t really compare. The PHP 1 or 2 days — you had, like, simple text embedded in HTML that [was] very, very small code.”

Recent Technical Improvements in PHP

Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) was released on June 8, 1995, by an independent developer from Canada named Rasmus Lerdorf. As I explained in a separate history of PHP article, at launch PHP Tools was a utility library and templating engine for the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). In modern terms, we can think of it as similar to a JavaScript library like React — although obviously much less complicated, since this was 1995.

As Rethans noted above, the current version of PHP is very different — it’s not just a toolset anymore, it’s a full-blown programming language. But how has it changed more recently, say in the past decade?

“The way the type system has extended in the last five to ten years [has] made PHP a lot more of a serious language.”
– Rethans

“PHP, as a language itself, has gotten a lot more type safe,” said Rethans. “When I started using PHP, everything was a string and a number and an array, all at the same time. Although that is still the case, you can now use the language in such a way that each thing is typed. There’s inheritance hierarchies in there, the scalar types [data types that can hold only one value at a time]. The way the type system has extended in the last five to ten years, has in my opinion made PHP a lot more of a serious language.”

PHP has also gotten more syntax features over the last decade, which Rethans says makes working with PHP code a lot easier.

But overall, it’s been the advances in the type system that has “made PHP grow up,” he said.

PHP Frameworks Are Big Business

Part of the reason why PHP has endured into the JavaScript-first era of web development is due to its large, user-friendly frameworks: Laravel, Symfony and Laminas (formerly Zend Framework) are a few of the leading ones.

These frameworks, says Rethans, are “focused on getting things done quickly.” A bit like Ruby on Rails in early Web 2.0, I asked? He agreed, saying that modern PHP frameworks are “a PHP implementation [of Rails], or a very, very similar idea.”

Laravel is probably the most high-profile of these tools. It was launched as an open source PHP framework in 2011 by Taylor Otwell, who then launched a company called Laravel LLC a few years later. Just last September, the company took in its first big VC funding round — $57 million from Accel. In the announcement post, Otwell made it clear that Laravel is much more than a backend framework now. “I believe that Laravel is the most productive way to build full-stack web applications,” he wrote, also mentioning its upcoming Laravel Cloud platform for deployment (which launched in February of this year).

All this is to say: Laravel is big business now.

PHP frameworks are “very useful for the PHP ecosystem, because they show that PHP is a very modern language that agencies can use…”
– Rethans

Rethans remarked that PHP frameworks have been particularly useful for agencies creating websites for clients. The focus has typically been on developer speed, which has its pros and cons.

“If as an agency you need to crank out a website for your customer in two weeks, then that is great. But I sometimes think that if you want to work on an application that runs for a much longer time, that is going to require a lot of maintenance. That [a framework] might not necessarily be the way forward.”

Regardless, Rethans thinks frameworks like Laravel are “very useful for the PHP ecosystem, because they show that PHP is a very modern language that agencies can use to be very proficient getting new things out for the customers.”

He added that the large frameworks are also “very good at marketing,” which helps PHP as a language stay front-of-mind for developers.

WordPress and Its Increasing Use of JavaScript

The elephant in the room with PHP in 2025 is WordPress. While PHP is still the core language of WordPress (to write this article, I opened a URL ending ‘/wp-admin/post-new.php’), in recent years the project has been moving some frontend features to JavaScript — most notably, the Gutenberg block editor. This shift has been a major factor in the popularity of PHP declining by more than 40% over the past few years. I asked Rethans what he makes of the pivot from PHP by WordPress (at least on the frontend)?

He firstly pointed out that for those who self-host WordPress, it’s still mostly PHP they encounter. But for provided hosting, this is where JavaScript functionality comes into play — “they don’t have to deal with the backend situation, they only use the frontend, for things like editing and setting up sites, and stuff like that.”

A balance between frontend and backend code is still required.

He acknowledges that some of the WordPress frontend software has moved to JavaScript, but says that a balance between frontend and backend code is still required.

“So I think it is always going to be this combination between, you need to run something on the frontend and on the backend. And what these two languages are doesn’t really matter very much, of course. But I would say that with JavaScript and PHP [both] having very good JSON support, the interaction works really well together there.”

How to Run PHP Also Changing

WordPress aside, there’s a lot to be optimistic about with PHP in 2025. Rethans mentioned a new tool called FrankenPHP a couple of times in our conversation, as an example of where the PHP ecosystem is headed. The homepage describes FrankenPHP as a “modern PHP app server, written in Go.” In short, it modifies how you run PHP.

“So traditionally, you run PHP in a web server, [where] each request stands on its own,” explained Rethans. “whereas with tools like FrankenPHP, […] you will probably see something like a hybrid model of what you would do with an application server, but at the same time still has this request-response model.”

FrankenPHP joined The PHP Foundation as an official project on 8 June 2025, 30 years to the day after Rasmus Lerdorf released PHP Tools.

A final note: if you’re a PHP developer, or perhaps someone looking to move into PHP, check out the upcoming PHPverse 2025 virtual event being run by JetBrains on 17 June. It will not only celebrate 30 years of PHP, but you’ll discover more about the current ecosystem.