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What is PHP?
PHP (which originally stood for Personal Home Page) was first written
by Rasmus Lerdorf as a simple set of Perl scripts to track users
of his Web pages. He soon had enquiries from other people and rewrote
it as a scripting engine.
PHP now stood for PHP Hypertext Processor, an open source, server-side,
HTML embedded scripting language used to create dynamic Web pages.
In an HTML document, PHP script (similar syntax to that of Perl
or C ) is enclosed within special PHP tags. Because PHP is embedded
within tags, the author can jump between HTML and PHP (similar to
ASP and Cold Fusion) instead of having to rely on heavy amounts
of code to output HTML. And, because PHP is executed on the server,
the client cannot view the PHP code. PHP can perform any task that
any CGI program can do, but its strength lies in its compatibility
with many types of databases. Also, PHP can talk across networks
using IMAP, SNMP, NNTP, POP3, or HTTP. PHP was created sometime
in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. During mid 1997, PHP development entered
the hands of other contributors. Two of them, Zeev Suraski and Andi
Gutmans, rewrote the parser from scratch to create PHP version 3
(PHP3).
Why PHP?
According to NetCraft surveys, PHP is now the most popular module
for the Apache server and in total running on something like two
million Web sites.
http://www.php.net/usage.php
It's no secret that there are alternatives to PHP: ASP, Cold Fusion,
and Perl, to name just a few. While each of these languages has
differences in syntax and structure, when it comes down to it, they
can all produce the same results.
So, why would you choose PHP over other options?
- Simplicity. For people new to programming, this is frequently
the strongest appeal. Even those with little or no programming experience
can quickly get up to speed and begin creating full-fledged applications.
Because it was specifically designed for creating web applications,
PHP has a host of built-in functions to handle common needs.
- PHP is Open Source. Because PHP's source code is freely
available, a community of developers is always working to improve,
add to, and find bugs in the language. Open Source means you never
need to rely on the manufacturer to release the next version if
something doesn't work or pay for expensive upgrades.
- Stability, and compatibility. Currently, PHP runs stable
on a range of operating systems including most flavors of UNIX,
Windows and Macs and integrates well with most popular servers including
IIS and apache.
PHP is also endowed with other goodies, like native support for
many popular databases, an extensible architecture, and a processor
that not only uses fewer resources on the server than many of its
competitors, but also displays pages in record time.
Advantages of PHP
- PHP will run on (almost) any platform. Using the same code base,
PHP can be compiled and built on about 25 platforms, including
most UNIXs, Windows(95/98/NT/2000) and Macs. As this uses the
same code base, all scripts will run identically, whatever the
platform.
- PHP is similar to C. So anyone who has experience with a C-style
language will soon understand PHP. In C-style languages we can
also include Javascript and Java. In fact, much of PHP's functionality
is provided by wrappers around the underlying system calls (such
as fread() and strlen()) so C programmers will immediately feel
at home.
- PHP is extendible. PHP consists of the core parsing engine (written
by Zend), a set of core code modules and then a set of code extensions.
This allows programmers two ways of extending PHP to do some special
processing, either by writing an extension module and compiling
it into the executable, or by creating an executable that can
be loaded using PHP's dynamic loading mechanism.
- Lots of HTTP server interfaces. PHP currently will load into
Apache, IIS, AOLServer, Roxen and THTTPD. Alternatively, it can
be run as a CGI module.
- Lots of database interfaces. PHP currently will work with MySQL,
MS SQL, Oracle, Informix, PostgreSQL and many others. These are
binary level interfaces, and ODBC is also provided for those situations
where the database is not supported.
- And lots of other modules... when a PHP user wants to interface
to particular library, then it is easy to write an interface for
it, and many have done so, and contributed to the main PHP source
repository. So you can find modules for graphics routines, PDF
files, Flash movies, Cybercash, calendars, XML, IMAP, POP and
a host of others. If the library you need is not supported, you
can either write one yourself, or employ your favourite programmer
to do it.
- PEAR. The PHP Extension and Add-on Repository. Similar to the
CPAN network for Perl, although still in its infancy, the idea
of PEAR is to provide a set of PHP scripts that would be installed
by default with the PHP installation
- Fast. PHP is normally used an Apache module and this makes it
very fast. It is entirely written in C and is quite small, so
loads and executes quickly with small memory footprint.
- PHP is Open Source. Almost a religious matter to some people!
In purely practical terms, it means that you are not dependent
on a manufacturer to fix things that don't work, nor are you forced
to pay for upgrades every year to get a working version. Those
of us who have waited for Allaire to get something fixed will
appreciate this.
Where can I download PHP?
http://www.php.net/downloads.php
Getting started with PHP
http://www.php.net/manual/en/tutorial.firstpage.php
Useful PHP Links
http://www.php.net/
http://www.phpbuilder.com/
http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/PHP/
http://php.resourceindex.com/
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