There was a time when an entire website containing several web pages was easily possible on PHP instead of HTML file for each page. As PHP was free to download and could be easily installed, PHP website development became very popular and most of the business entities were looking for establishing their online identities by building websites by PHP. And specifically during the periods of recessions, for continuing the web business unimpeded PHP experts were called upon and greater demands were created for PHP website development. Since PHP is a free source language and less complicated compared to other programming languages like Java, .Net, etc it was of great demand and stood out uniquely among other programming languages. Almost anyone could easily learn PHP and therefore the cost of website development was greatly reduced. To go with PHP, MySQL database also provided free solutions to several problems related to database management which were only possible by expert programmers that largely increased the budgets for web development until that point. But the situation has largely changed in recent times as the competition has increased a lot which has led to the birth of several other frameworks and languages and so on. Today it takes almost nothing to set up a fully fledged blog only at the expense of a free Word press account. This is perhaps accountable for growing complexities of PHP and virtually the MySQL database is no longer entirely free.
Since they are open source, there is no point in concluding that PHP and MySQL lacks any sort of functional properties that other programming languages or databases have. In fact, over the years PHP together with MySQL have produced some of the most successful instances of PHP website development. As for example php experts have produced some websites like WordPress, Yahoo and so on and deserve to be mentioned. But with time PHP and MySQL had to undergo development owing to the complicacies of the demanding projects. MySQL database has undergone radical changes and PHP is now a far more complex and powerful programming language compared to what it was a couple of years back. There are greater options for the PHP experts to prove their proficiencies in PHP website development as the number of opportunities for web development in PHP has greatly increased. But with greater complexities, it has become quite difficult for the beginners to get accustomed with the features of PHP language.
Even these days PHP has completely got rid of some of the beginner-friendly features as those may have enabled the inexperienced developers to build websites but at the same time left a lot of problems related to security of such websites unresolved. No matter what problems may arise in the near future in terms of web development, it can be acknowledged beyond doubt that there are better prospects for PHP experts and PHP website development is definitely going to prosper.
