A year and half ago, we launched support for PHP on Heroku, built from the ground up with modern features designed to give developers a more elegant and productive experience on the platform. Last week, we made PHP 7 available on top of a new, reworked version of our PHP support, and our users are adopting PHP 7’s exciting new features and stellar performance improvements quickly—we’re already seeing PHP 7 being used in the majority of PHP deploys on Heroku.

Under the hood, much of the logic that handles a deploy has changed, but not the fundamental principles upon which our support for PHP applications is designed. We've always been determined to provide a fully standards-based...

The history of PHP is the history of the web. Long-time developers will remember how PHP changed the universe of web development. PHP brought two key innovations to the table when it first launched. First, it was interpreted, which meant you could edit a file in place, then refresh the page and see the result. This quick feedback loop was why so many started with PHP and is still a cornerstone of what makes the language so useful. Second, it was the first widespread templating language which enabled intermixing of HTML and PHP code. Every other major web language and framework since PHP has followed suit.

Over time, PHP became a cornerstone of the “LAMP stack”. The LAMP stack consisted of...