Lifecycle

The lifecycle of an application spans from initial development to decommissioning, covering stages like specifications, prototyping, coding, testing, deployment, maintenance, and eventual retirement.

Understanding the lifecycle helps teams build, deploy, and manage applications efficiently while ensuring reliability, security, and scalability.

The lifecycle is different depending on the team building it, and factors like community effort, personal interest or company mission.

As such, PHP itself has a lifecycle, with the regular release of a new version every year.

In PHP, lifecycle also refers to the execution cycle or request lifecycle, from starting the PHP engine, executing the code and terminating.

See also Learning the PHP lifecycle and PHP Community Support Lifecycle Changes: What Do They Mean for Your Team?.

Related : Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Execution, Bootstrap, Code Freeze, Total Cost Of Ownership (TCO)