An Alternative to PHP

21st October 2026 saw the disclosure of two major vulnerabilties in PHP. This is somewhat problematic as most of the websites on the Internet have been built on the technologies of PHP.

Many of the popular CMS (Content Managment Systems) have been built using PHP. These include Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla.

On the surface of things there are many alternatives to PHP. The hackr.io website lists some of them and they include Javascript (at the top of the list), Java, Python, Ruby and C#. Strangely Perl was not mentioned. C++ comes in at 9th position.

The use of PHP is quite compelling as there is such a wealth of effort that has been put into its development. Database support is built in and there are many support programs that can be used to maintain the MySQL databases. Most Linux server options, and probably Microsoft offerings, offer not only PHP but MySQL databases. The MySQL database is now part of the Oracle family and therefore supported by by what is probably the premier database vendor.

The use of Javascript

I make extensive use of Javascript to manioulate the DOm, the use of Javascript to access API's run on the server will need to become more prevalent.

Exposing Login Credentials

Having embarked on developing routines to access the MySQL database that is part of my hosting package I am a little concerned that my credentials are potentially exposed should the source file be downloaded. The username, password and database name are all hard-coded in the html file.