Developer WhyPHP

Why PHP?

SMStoXMPP is developed in PHP as it's a good language for rapid prototyping of applications with a large library of functions that make building apps like this quick and easy.

However it also has it's downsides, such as suboptimal memory management compared to other platforms, less robust daemon libraries and some amount of stigma that is somewhat undeserved about the quality of the PHP language.

It would be possible to re-write this application in other dynamic languages such as Python or Ruby, but if doing a re-write, it would be more useful to go directly towards a more speedy system such as C++ or Java.

However leaving in PHP does make it more accessible to a wider range of developers and this is more useful as it encourages contributions and more worthwhile than tuning the memory consumption down by a few MB.

I may re-write at some point, but for now the reasons are not high enough to justify it.