
As of early 2021, nearly 80% of all websites are using PHP. PHP (a recursive acronym for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) is an open source, server-side scripting language widely used for web development. For many users, though, the disadvantages of scripting languages are more than offset by their ease of use and iteration. Runtime compilation also results in the application stopping or shutting down if it encounters a runtime error in contrast, pre-compiled applications perform error checking during compilation, making them more robust at runtime. Being platform-specific, scripting languages rely on the compiler of the application in which they are working.Īpplications built using scripting languages are compiled at runtime, meaning that each instruction is interpreted individually at runtime, rendering the application slower than a pre-compiled application. In contrast, programming languages are platform-agnostic, compiled languages. Scripting languages are platform-specific, interpreted languages. While scripting languages and programming languages are related, they have several noticeable differences, primarily in ease of use and speed of execution.

Laravel is a PHP framework and uses a scripting language rather than being a strict PHP programming language. Many of Laravel’s features, however, are frontend agnostic. Laravel is primarily a backend development framework, though it does offer some frontend functionality.
