Looking to do some PHP development in London or UK?

Our PHP expertise.

At Magic Web, we started using PHP in 1999 when this technology first emerged. We’ve seen the rise and fall of various PHP frameworks, and worked with most of them.

Experience with PHP frameworks:

Laravel
CodeIgniter
CakePHP
Symfony
Zend Framework 2
Phalcon
Yii
Aura

Our experience with content management systems (CMS):

WordPress, Joomla, Drupal
This includes creating customisations, writing plugins and modules and modifying the core.

Database solutions for PHP applications.

Most of our projects use MySQL but we have worked with PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Neo4j as well.

Applications are typically hosted on AWS or Google Cloud.

Our senior PHP developers have competed a number of complex websites and services using PHP. These include corporate websites, e-commerce solutions, portals, business automation software and Software as a Service.

We are looking for challenging projects that are best suited to a small and dedicated team of senior developers.

Why Magic Web Solutions?

We are relationship driven technologists.
Many developers need a spec, we need a vision.
We use agile, iterative approach.
Only senior developers will work on your project.
We have 17 years of experience of building PHP applications.
We are a full cycle agency and experts in PHP.
Our technical expertise is complemented by great graphic design and digital marketing skills.

Should you develop your web application in PHP?

PHP is an open source solution.

The widely recognized benefits of open source software include the availability of source code, wide support communities and existing code libraries. Many small and medium-sized web applications are built using open source software, PHP and MySQL. The biggest reason is simple; they can dramatically reduce your development and long-term maintenance costs.

Complex web sites and portals often use PHP content management systems. Those systems rely on MySQL as a database.

Some examples include:

WordPress – started as a blogging platform, but now is a fully featured Website CMS, with thousands of available plugins and unlimited possibilities.
Joomla – a well-known CMS that is used by millions of websites.
Magento – a popular and respected e-commerce platform that is also run on PHP and MySQL.
Drupal – a platform that is best suited for building portals and communities.

Benefits of PHP over other platforms such as Java & .NET

When compared to other platforms there is a larger pool of PHP developers. PHP skills are readily available and less expensive than those of Java or .NET. As a result, using PHP as a platform over the others can provide significant cost savings to a business.

MYSQL Database

PHP works well when paired with a MySQL database. Soon after the PHP language was created, a few modules were written to simplify working with databases. These modules make it easy and efficient to work with MySQL databases in PHP. MySQL is built to be easy to use and has obtained wide support among developers.

A common alternative to MySQL is PostgreSQL . PostgreSQL more closely resembles enterprise databases such as Oracle. PostgreSQL is the world’s most advanced Open Source database. It includes support for parallel queries, performance enhancements to Foreign Data Wrappers, multiple synchronous standbys and much, much more.

PHP code can also be written in an object-oriented fashion using tools that are built into the language, so it can also work well with object relational databases.

What is LAMP stack?

LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, and provides a web development platform that uses only open-source software.

The LAMP Stack includes:

A Linux based web server
An Apache web server
A MySQL Database
A PHP programming platform

Some of the top web development companies use LAMP stack to create dynamic and creative web sites and applications for their customers. This environment assists PHP developers by providing technologies that work well together to provide the needed services for web-based applications.

PHP Security

Security is of paramount importance to any web-based application, including PHP apps. This is especially true if you store some type of business-sensitive data or your client’s details.

Open source solutions tend to suffer from opportunistic attacks more than other systems. Since their code is open anyone can explore the codebase and attempt to find a back door.

For well-known solutions, updates and patches are issued more or less immediately in response to security complaints. It is important to update them regularly. Maintenance of PHP websites is imperative, so you need to create an ongoing relationship with your PHP developer.

As PHP is easy to learn, there are many PHP developers out there with very basic knowledge of the language. They can create basic interactive features by copying and pasting the code from reference websites or by modifying existing components. Needless to say that this sort of approach will create a solution with security problems.

PHP web sites can be built with high levels of security in mind. To achieve this you will require a more experienced technical team who understand all aspects of security and security testing.

PHP Frameworks and Components

Using PHP frameworks and components can assist developers by helping them to create clear, consistent code that complies with the latest standards. This helps to improve security and performance, while also making the process of updating the application much easier for PHP developers.

PHP Web Application Performance

PHP is known for fast performance even on moderately specified hardware. When your PHP website or web application fails to perform due to a large number of users many business people will tell you that it is a good problem to have. We would suggest that it is only a good problem if you know how to fix it.

Many PHP website projects are built by web design companies with very limited technical skills. The site can look good and be usable, but when it comes to good architecture, security, and scalability it can fail. You might need to find a more technical provider who has better ideas about performance tuning.

We are experienced in designing high load applications and in performance tuning of PHP web applications.

Hosting options for PHP and MySQL

Even the cheapest shared hosting offerings have provision for PHP and MySQL. Monthly service costs can start from $5 a month and this approach can be used for simple web sites that require few resources. For complex and demanding web sites this can easily be scaled up to a more robust solution like AWS (Amazon Web Services) hosting, which uses a cloud solution to provide computing resources.

PHP Development Company, London, UK.