Evolution of PHP Applications: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

This paper reviews, some of the research work done in the evolution of PHP applications that have been around and are vastly used. PHP is currently one of the most popular programming languages, widely used in both the open source community and in industry to build large web-focused applications and application frameworks. This review looks at how PHP applications have evolved in terms of the use of libraries, the software maturity, adoption of object-orientation paradigm, the evolution of complexity and security. The results suggest that these systems undergo systematic maintenance and evolution is helping the underlying programming language to grow.