PHP vs Nodejs which is better for web development?? Before that one needs to understand the ability of Nodejs and PHP in application development for better clarity on the comparison.
Both the Nodejs and PHP are one of the most popular environments for web development solutions but Node JS is good in comparison to PHP. Nodejs is asynchronous by nature which means the JavaScript chrome engine runs via the whole code. But PHP is synchronous that behave slower in the execution of code.
Overview of PHP
PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is a conventional purpose scripting language that quickly became the popular server-side language of choice for web development. A majority of sites on the web today run on PHP, just because of its popularity as the top priority language for content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and other modern frameworks like Laravel, Symfony, and CakePHP that accelerates development process with this aged-language.
Overview of Nodejs
Nodejs is an open-source technology, cross-platform for back-end for building server-side network web applications. It uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model and enables the development of apps with a responsive back-end.
Read: What is blocking and non-blocking in Nodejs
Its JavaScript runtime environment with the largest ecosystem of open source libraries for executing the JavaScript code.
Nodejs is a runtime environment that uses JavaScript which is much feasible for development extensive applications that uses huge servers base.
PHP vs Nodejs: Key differences
While both are server-side technologies, there are a few differences between a PHP and a Nodejs:
PHP vs Nodejs: APPLICATION DOMAIN
Nodejs and PHP, both are used to serve-based web applications. They run on the server to handle requests which streamed to them. One can use either one of them for static content, dynamic web pages.
Nodejs is a more popular option when it comes to serving web sockets—the go-to implementation is socket.io. This technology particularly used for serving upstream as well. However, Nodejs has a very straightforward way of doing so with the stream API. PHP is a bit more complicated than you’ve got to do more of the low-level coding even to stream a video.
Where Nodejs and PHP overlap each other at some point but Nodejs is a bit more user-friendly and enables us to write modern web-based applications with Nodejs. This results in better productivity.
PHP vs Nodejs: EXTENSIBILITY
Basically, most developers want these technologies to fit their own circumstances. At any level, one can divide the source code, modify it, and compile to extend. But still many add-ons available in Nodejs. Now, it’s important to note how extensible the Nodejs and PHP is. They both similar in open source, and rich features of add-ons.
Nodejs has a rich package registry called NPM(Node package manager) with strong community support. There are other Nodejs packages registries that act as great resources for application development.
Read: What is NPM? and what’s great about it?
PHP has two of the most popular package managers (i.e) PEAR and Composer. Both package managers have been around longer so the developer community needs more time to build alternatives. We may see Nodejs as a better option to the forefront in the near future. In terms of extensibility, Nodejs leads a bit in terms of package managers.
PHP vs Nodejs: RUNTIME AND LANGUAGE
As everyone knows, Nodejs is a runtime environment that runs the JS language on a server that is originally designed to run in a browser externally. Such feature-powered enables a web browser to take action on the client-side without relying on any platform-specific like a Java applet or Flash. There were other JavaScript runtimes with the same work phenomenon, but Nodejs really came along in the right ways at the right time. It powers up the developers to use JavaScript beyond the browser.
PHP is a scripting language. You could actually run it in a browser using an interpreter such as the Zend engine in the webserver module. PHP was made to deliver web content to browsers from a server.
Since PHP relies on various web servers, Nodejs is the winner here since it acts on its own.
PHP vs Nodejs: Program TYPE AND EXECUTION SPEED
PHP is mostly synchronous with an exception in some APIs. In this scenario, the previous line of program code has a function that takes much time to execute so that the rest of the code has to wait which results in longer execution time.
Unlike PHP, Nodejs code is asynchronous which means that the JS engine runs the entire code at once and there is no need for waiting for a function to get complete. Hence, Nodejs is unbelievably fast compared to PHP code.
A program gets struck if there are a lot of functions that need to be chained. So the Nodejs has a workaround for this issue as an asynchronous feature of Nodejs enables a block of code to execute at any circumstances.
Considering the above factors, I would suggest Nodejs than PHP for application development since it has some peculiar advantages to its account:
EASY TO LEARN
Since JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages, most front-end developers have a piece of good knowledge about it. It becomes a lot easier for them to start using the Nodejs at the backend. It is quite easy to learn Nodejs & consume less time to work with it.
MORE FLEXIBLE
When we discuss software app development with Nodejs, there are very limited guidelines and dependencies. There are no particular rules for developers to choose a set architecture, which enables them to access the huge number of different modules. It is much easier to learn Nodejs which is ideal when working with huge files.
SERVER-SIDE SOLUTION
Using JavaScript built-in asynchronous processing, one can create highly scalable and server-side solutions that maximize the usage of a single CPU while servicing more concurrent requests than conventional multi-threaded servers. This functionality makes Nodejs a great fit for asynchronous, data-driven applications and heavy I/O-bound workflows for SPAs (Single-page Applications).
CONCLUSION
As you have seen, In particular, the asynchronous and event-based architecture of Nodejs makes it a great fit for Real-Time Applications (i.e. instant messaging, collaborative apps) and Single-Page Applications in which many requests arise concurrently and data is frequently shuffled back and forth from the server-side to the client-side.
Hence, choosing the Nodejs platform over PHP is still a good choice.
If you’re planning to build any Nodejs based web application, Contact us for better clarity and cost-effective web development.
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