PHP Development

The PHP people argue about on the internet stopped existing around 2015. Modern PHP — 8.3 and 8.4 — is a strictly typed, JIT-compiled language with enums, readonly properties, first-class callable syntax, fibers and an ecosystem held together by Composer and the PSR standards. We have shipped more revenue-carrying systems on it than on any other server-side stack, and the reason is unglamorous: a disciplined team ships a correct, tested, maintainable business application in PHP faster than in almost anything else, and the engineer who inherits it in three years recognises what they are looking at.

Laravel or Symfony is a real decision, not a default

Most of our PHP development is Laravel, because for a transactional product — orders, payments, inventory, approvals, reporting, an admin panel — its batteries-included answer to every problem is usually the one the next PHP engineer would have reached for anyway, which is what makes the codebase outlive the team that wrote it. We reach for Symfony when the domain wants explicit architecture over convention: a large system with many bounded contexts, a long-lived platform where the framework should stay out of the domain model, or a team that already lives in Symfony components. Both are excellent; choosing the wrong one for the shape of the problem is the mistake we are most often asked to unwind, and we decide it in week one and write down why.

Types and static analysis, not "PHP is loose"

Every project we start runs PHPStan or Psalm at a high level from the first commit, with strict types declared, real return types everywhere, and generics annotations on collections. The old complaint that PHP lets anything through is a complaint about undisciplined PHP. A modern codebase with static analysis in CI catches the same class of error a compiler would, before it reaches a review, let alone production. An untyped property or a suppressed analysis error is a review failure, not a style preference.

Queues and workers are where the application actually lives

Anything that talks to a system we do not control goes onto a queue — payment webhooks, GST filings, carrier APIs, invoice PDFs, e-way bills, notification fan-out. Jobs are idempotent, because a queue delivers twice eventually and that day should be uneventful; they retry with backoff and land in a dead-letter store with the full payload and a screen an operator can replay from. This single architectural habit is the largest difference between a PHP application that survives its first sale day and one that falls over inside it.

Legacy PHP is a rescue, rarely a rewrite

Half the PHP work that reaches us is a system on PHP 5.6 or 7.x — raw mysql_* calls, no framework, no tests, business logic braided through HTML. The instinct to rewrite it from scratch is almost always wrong and almost always expensive. We put the running code under characterisation tests first, lift it onto a supported PHP version and Composer autoloading, then strangle it route by route into a modern Laravel or Symfony codebase that ships the whole way through. The business keeps trading while the foundation is replaced underneath it.