When I first started developing web pages using static HTML, it quickly became painful to maintain the website as the number of pages increased. I ended up leaving my website project without updates for several years (yes, you read it right, years). Then I discovered PHP. It was a joy to write scripts that can access databases and update the content of the website dynamically. Although I didn’t get back to my website project immediately, I was using PHP in most, if not all, my web application needs where I used to work. I was working for a semiconductor company and developed a lot of web based reporting applications.

As if discovering PHP was not enough, I discovered WordPress and that’s when I decided to go back to my website project again. (There’s another post I have on WordPress). WordPress is written in PHP, uses MySQL for the backend, and uses templates and CSS for the look and feel. With my proficiency in PHP/HTML/CSS already beyond beginner’s level, WordPress became *very* easy for me to customize.

Then I started using PHP for data processing as an alternative language to Perl. I soon loved the fact that I can share configuration files for both backend and frontend sections of my web applications using only one language. In the past, I normally use Perl for backend processing because it has excellent text processing capabilities. I still think PHP cannot beat Perl in text processing but for convenience, PHP can be used for text processing especially if you are also using PHP for your front-end web application. I missed the regular expressions shortcuts that I can do in Perl but the tradeoff was worth it.