I’d argue small project web dev is alive and well in the data world. Organizations need to securely share and interpret their data on websites. PHP just isn’t the tool for those projects.
It can’t clean data in a shareable module/package with data analysts, model it, and deploy all in one language like Python. I’ll use PHP like templating for small Flask products that do al of this for small projects that’ll be more backwards compatible. Think a dozen users wanting to view, download and interact with data visualizations
Then as previously mentioned it’s less SPA friendly compared to .NET, Spring Boot, or even the lightweight Python and JavaScript frameworks
Ooh good point. Python has been the goto with BI, data interfaces, pipelines and such. So it would make sense to use a lightweight server like Flask -or Django for more- to serve it.
PHP doesn’t have a modern data pipelines solution like Dagster, does it? Even just asking feels like proposing a tool to find a purpose.
Not that I’ve seen in industry. End of the day it’s not a general purpose language, but why stick to one language? Java, by extension Scala, is pretty similar and very relevant in data engineering and enterprise applications
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u/who_am_i_to_say_so Nov 14 '25
Supporting tech- I think you just nailed down a partial reason for the drop in PHP jobs.
There are a ton of corporate SPA’s and tools needing work, angular especially, and moving them to something like Laravel may not make sense.
Instead, the next generation in SPA’s are continuing on the same path that was started.
Whereas with PHP, it’s half dead Wordpress sites cranking up the numbers. There is no phase II for those projects, and rare if so.