PHP trends predictions in 2022

What are the biggest trends in PHP you have seen over the past year?

A few weeks ago, a new version of PHP has been released, version 8.1. So basically, it’s the main event in our language for this year.

As far as I know at the end of next year, PHP 7.4 will not be in support mode. This means there will be no new releases and will be made in the minor version. So basically, companies should think about their strategy of how to improve the current development process and look to migrate to a new version of PHP which will be version 8 or 8.1.

I recently listened to an online PHP conference on YouTube and a big company in Russia said they are working to move to the new version that was released two weeks ago, version 8.1.

We tried to change instructions in the existing code and focus on knowing if everything works as expected. As a result, it did challenge for these companies, and I believe that some of these strategic points will be applied in Godel as well in our engagements.

We will introduce a plan of when exactly we want to migrate to this latest version of PHP which we hope to eb able to do with at least 50% of our projects.

The good news is if we switch simple instructions from PHP 7 into PHP 8, it can work without any changes. However, in some cases, we will need to apply some new instructions to allow us to work in the past version of PHP, but not be recognised by the new version. So, it depends on the case, of course.

What are your 3 predictions for where PHP is heading in the 2022?

1. We will see how PHP 8.1 will affect our whole community in Fusion next year and we will decide what should be the next strategy points for this language.

2. The future PHP core team will bring new features and will improve the performance of this language by processing any request by doing something backend. This is because if we are looking into previous improvements in this case, I can see that for example, PHP 7.4 is not so powerful when talking about speed and performance. In this case, PHP 8.1 is great just because it will bring a lot of improvements.

3. During 2021, our new and existing clients were looking for PHP developers with fullstack in the ground. If we are talking about 2022, I believe it’ll be the same. We’ll try to focus on working as a fullstack developer, but it depends on project of course.