PHP's PDO is extremely easy to work with. Seriously, it's like 5 lines of code to connect to a database and retrieve information. Is that really all that difficult?
Security? DB-wise, use PDO and named parameters. It's passing in an array. Sessions? For private servers, using file-based is fine. For shared or for scaling, use DB/memcache.
APIs? It's dead easy to implement a RESTful interface. Interacting with remote APIs is nothing more than some curl commands, or your tool of choice.
Explain to me what's so difficult here?
Having a language behave slightly differently between different operating systems is ... expected? Maybe? I'm not sure, I never use PHP on Windows. Why would I?
Security? DB-wise, use PDO and named parameters. It's passing in an array. Sessions? For private servers, using file-based is fine. For shared or for scaling, use DB/memcache.
APIs? It's dead easy to implement a RESTful interface. Interacting with remote APIs is nothing more than some curl commands, or your tool of choice.
Explain to me what's so difficult here?
Having a language behave slightly differently between different operating systems is ... expected? Maybe? I'm not sure, I never use PHP on Windows. Why would I?