Over the past year, PHP has had some great success stories, including the release of several new versions (v5.4 in 2012 and a recently launched Beta of 5.5 in 2013), which have included many much-needed updates and functionality enhancements. This milestone really helped to catapult PHP to the next level, considering that in the past there’s been some criticisms against the language. It’s true that PHP is not perfect, but no language is. However, PHP has greatly evolved from a template language to one that lets you pick and choose your components for maximum efficiency. Let’s review some of the PHP solutions that have really made an impact: Composer – With Composer, a new dependency manager solution for PHP, packages are now installed locally to a project’s directory, making documentation easy to find and providing an intuitive solution that developers had long been looking for. With locally stored packages, project distribution is simpler and downloads and loading of dependencies is automatic, proving to be a real time-saver in terms of keeping files up-to-date. The result? Code is cleaner and custom framework is more seamless than ever before. Laravel – This clean PHP framework has the elegance of Ruby, but brings an innovation that PHP needed when it comes to templating, migrations and routing. Objects can now be easily modified, saved and combined. Even search queries are a cinch. The best part? Laravel is continually being updated and upgraded. With so many feature upgrades in the latest versions (namely having to do with traits, generators and de-referencing, plus the new API), PHP implementation and adoption continues to grow – even more drastically than the past few years. We can’t wait to see what v6 has in store.Over the past year, PHP has had some great success stories, including the release of several new versions (v5.4 in 2012 and a recently launched Beta of 5.5 in 2013), which have included many much-needed updates and functionality enhancements. This milestone really helped to catapult PHP to the next level, considering that in the past there’s been some criticisms against the language. It’s true that PHP is not perfect, but no language is. However, PHP has greatly evolved from a template language to one that lets you pick and choose your components for maximum efficiency. Let’s review some of the PHP solutions that have really made an impact: Composer – With Composer, a new dependency manager solution for PHP, packages are now installed locally to a project’s directory, making documentation easy to find and providing an intuitive solution that developers had long been looking for. With locally stored packages, project distribution is simpler and downloads and loading of dependencies is automatic, proving to be a real time-saver in terms of keeping files up-to-date. The result? Code is cleaner and custom framework is more seamless than ever before. Laravel – This clean PHP framework has the elegance of Ruby, but brings an innovation that PHP needed when it comes to templating, migrations and routing. Objects can now be easily modified, saved and combined. Even search queries are a cinch. The best part? Laravel is continually being updated and upgraded. With so many feature upgrades in the latest versions (namely having to do with traits, generators and de-referencing, plus the new API), PHP implementation and adoption continues to grow – even more drastically than the past few years. We can’t wait to see what v6 has in store.