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 built more systems that earn money on it than on any other server-side stack. The reason is simple: a careful team builds a correct, tested business application in PHP that is easy to maintain, faster than in almost anything else. And the engineer who takes it over in three years understands what they are looking at.

Laravel or Symfony is a real decision, not a default

Most of our PHP development is Laravel. For a product with many transactions (orders, payments, inventory, approvals, reporting, an admin panel), its all-in-one answer to every problem is usually the one the next PHP engineer would have picked anyway. That is what lets the code outlive the team that wrote it. We pick Symfony when the system needs clearly planned structure over habit: a large system with many separate areas, a long-lived platform where the framework should stay out of the business model, or a team that already uses Symfony parts. Both are excellent. Picking the wrong one for the problem is the mistake we are most often asked to undo, so we decide 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 type notes on collections. The old complaint that PHP lets anything through is a complaint about careless PHP. A modern codebase with code checking in CI catches the same kind of error a compiler would, before it reaches a review, let alone live use. An untyped property or a hidden error is a review failure, not a matter of taste.

Queues and workers are where the application actually lives

Anything that talks to a system we do not control goes onto a queue. This includes payment webhooks, GST filings, carrier APIs, invoice PDFs, e-way bills and sending notifications to many people. Jobs are idempotent (safe to run twice), because a queue will deliver a job twice one day, and that day should pass without trouble. They retry with waiting time between tries and end up in a dead-letter store with the full data and a screen where an operator can run them again. This one habit is the biggest difference between a PHP application that survives its first sale day and one that breaks during 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, with raw mysql_* calls, no framework, no tests, and business rules mixed into HTML. The urge to rewrite it from scratch is almost always wrong and almost always costly. We first add tests that record how the running code behaves, move it to a supported PHP version and Composer autoloading, then replace it route by route with a modern Laravel or Symfony codebase that keeps shipping all the way. The business keeps trading while the base is replaced underneath it.