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The Zend 2023 PHP Landscape Report, an annual analysis of the PHP landscape compiled by Perforce Software, revealed that within the PHP community, more than 61 per cent of respondents use at least one version of PHP that is no longer supported. Among organisations employing more than 100 people, this proportion rose to around 66 per cent.
“PHP is evolving rapidly, and the results of our survey show once again that many teams either do not have the necessary resources to keep up consistently, or do not prioritise this,” said Matthew Weier O’Phinney, product manager at Zend.
“This puts them in a precarious position – one that potentially exposes their applications to dangerous vulnerabilities.”
Despite the fact that 68 per cent of respondents said they were planning an upgrade within the next 12 months, more than half said they spent only 25 per cent or less of their development time on maintenance tasks, such as migrations. Respondents agreed, citing the development of new features as more important than application security.
“The survey data clearly shows that some PHP development teams are forced to make difficult decisions during application development: should they prioritise the security of their applications and risk falling behind their competitors? Or should they focus on creating new features and ignore potential exposure to vulnerabilities?” added Matthew Weier O’Phinney.
“Fortunately, there are options that can help companies do both – such as commercial PHP LTS and Zend’s migration services.”
Containerisation, Orchestration
The document also examined orchestration and containerisation trends in the context of PHP. Over 57 per cent of respondents said they use containerisation technology, and over 47 per cent said they are already using orchestration tools. The survey results also revealed a strong correlation between usage and company size, with larger organisations being far more likely to use containerisation and orchestration technologies.
“PHP teams continue to lead the way in adopting containerisation and orchestration,” added Mr O’Phinney. “Whilst larger organisations in the software application industry typically adopt these trends slowly, large PHP teams are early and enthusiastic adopters.”
As in previous years, Zend used the survey to raise funds for a non-profit organisation supporting technology. The 2023 survey raised funds for the non-profit organisation Code2040, which aims to eliminate the systemic barriers that prevent Black and Latin American individuals from fully participating in and taking leadership roles within the innovation economy.