Differences between PHP and Nodejs

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Differences between PHP and Nodejs

2021年11月09日
技術情報

Today, I would like to share about differences between PHP and Nodejs for backend. Obviously, They have their own properties on particular aspects. The following are their comparisons.

Concurrency: Synchronous vs. Asynchronous

PHP is synchronous by nature, so it executes code line by line. When PHP code is executed, it waits for the current line to finish execution before it moves to the next line, and thus, it blocks the request.

Node.js is asynchronous by nature, so code doesn’t wait for I/O operations to complete their execution. For handling slow operations like I/O or remote data fetching, Node uses callbacks, promises, or JavaScript’s built-in and keywords. This makes Node.js pretty fast and makes it easy for a Node server to handle a high number of connections.

Runtime Environment: Zend Engine vs. V8 JavaScript Engine

PHP runs on the Zend engine, which is an open-source scripting engine which interprets the PHP code.

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform, back-end JavaScript runtime environment that runs on Google’s V8 JavaScript engine.

Package Manager: Composer vs. NPM

Package management is one of the gray areas in PHP and has been a topic for debate over the years. There has never been a standard package manager which PHP developers could use to install reusable PHP libraries and components. PEAR was a widely-used package manager for PHP, but can now be thought to be deprecated. However, with initiatives like PHP-FIG and Composer, the PHP community has finally got a reliable system. Composer can be considered the standard package manager for PHP.

On the other hand, Node.js already provides NPM (Node Package Manager), a package management system. It is easy to use NPM to manage Node packages in your application. In fact, NPM has become the de facto standard for sharing reusable JavaScript components.

Performance

Node.js is asynchronous by nature, and thus, it has superior performance on tasks with a lot of connections or a lot of time-consuming I/O or network operations. However, it’s important to note that Node.js is single-threaded by default, so a CPU-intensive operation in one request will block all connections to the server until it is complete.

By Asahi