(1) Dead-simple deployment story across a wide variety of needs. You want to throw your app's filetree in a directory on $10/mo hosting via SFTP? Easy peasy. You want turnkey autoscaling cloud deployments you don't have to build infra for? People will sell it to you.
(2) Beginner/junior friendly culture. Really, everywhere along the learning curve.
Both have long been PHP strengths. #2 was also a weakness for a long long time, that's how a lot of bad practices and blind-leading-the-blind happened. In the last 10 years that's been very much changed.
Java has also changed, of course, and selling people easy deployment has become industry-wide bread and butter, so you're probably correct that some gaps have narrowed, but AFAICT they haven't gone away.
Yes, with Java, the advent of the "fat-jar"/"uber-jar" deployments with an embedded server is far different than the massive deployable war to an application server stuff from yesteryear. And I can see that. PHP definitely allows one to "ladder up" a whole lot easier than some other languages.
Once we get into these large "batteries included" frameworks like Symfony and to a little lesser extent Laravel, it almost seems like that simplicity disappears.
(1) Dead-simple deployment story across a wide variety of needs. You want to throw your app's filetree in a directory on $10/mo hosting via SFTP? Easy peasy. You want turnkey autoscaling cloud deployments you don't have to build infra for? People will sell it to you.
(2) Beginner/junior friendly culture. Really, everywhere along the learning curve.
Both have long been PHP strengths. #2 was also a weakness for a long long time, that's how a lot of bad practices and blind-leading-the-blind happened. In the last 10 years that's been very much changed.
Java has also changed, of course, and selling people easy deployment has become industry-wide bread and butter, so you're probably correct that some gaps have narrowed, but AFAICT they haven't gone away.