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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