Introduction to PHP - Programming Language

PHP - Programming Language

Can you imagine a world without “Open source PHP”? The answer would be certainly “no”; PHP has powered up the internet as a major open source program and has dominated the current market by providing cost effective solution. Companies prefer PHP than other software’s, the reason anyone can understand is “It’s Cheap” and more important is the return on investment is outstanding. The simple fact is that it delivers the goods at an affordable price. The rise in popularity of PHP has led to change of approach in web-publishing. While in the mid-1990s it was ok to build sites, even relatively large sites, with hundreds of individual hard-coded HTML pages, with the use of PHP today’s webmasters are making the most of the power of databases to manage their content more effectively and to personalize their sites according to individual user preferences .

What is PHP?

PHP is officially called as “Hypertext Preprocessor”. Way back during the invention of PHP it was called as “Personal Home Page Tools”. Rasmus Lerdorf released PHP on June 8, 1995 to accelerate bug location and improve the code. This release was named PHP version 2 and already had the basic functionality that PHP has today.

“PHP is an Open-source computer scripting language originally designed for producing web dynamic and interactive web pages”. PHP is considered as fastest and simplest tool to create web sites with dynamic behavior. Examples of dynamic behavior include writing data to databases, processing credit cards in real-time, and running interactive news and chat web sites. It is used mainly in server side scripting usually written in an HTML context, but can be used from a command line interface or in standalone graphical applications.

PHP offers excellent connectivity coupled with many databases and web-servers, among them are MySQL “a relational database server”, Informix, Oracle, Sybase, Solid, PostgreSQL and Generic ODBC. The common combination between the PHP script and MySQL database is almost supported on every Linux-based web server. Together we can create everything from the simplest web site to a full blown business web site, an interactive web forum, or even an online role playing game.

Reasons to use PHP?

As an open source product, users has an easy access to the source codes of the software where revision of the codes is permissible as long as the modified version is indicated to be modified by another user. Its scalability, both on the technical and business front made it ideal for the Internet. And, needless to say, if you're in the software development business yourself, PHP as open-source software lends itself perfectly to collaborative software development.

PHP can run on all the major operating systems with most servers. As PHP allows you to separate HTML code from scripted elements you will naturally notice the increased speed in development. In many instances use of PHP has enabled to separate the coding stage of a project from the design and build stages. PHP as a boon to developers has made their life easier by removing obstacles that stand in the way of effective and flexible design.

Open-source PHP applications has changed the world from managing databases, writing blogs to sending emails. The features of PHP have made it one of the most widely preferred web development languages. There are many extremely popular PHP script-based web pages, and also a large number of PHP-based web applications. Being an open-source product, PHP lies at the base of many popular free web applications, to name a few free web applications on PHP are phpMyAdmin , SquirrelMail , PHP-Nuke , eZ Publish , phpAdsNew , Gallery , Drupal , MediaWiki, SugarCRM , Symfony ,Joomla, WordPress, the phpBB forum, OsCommerce, Zend Framework , Magento eCommerce and many others. Lastly, PHP has changed the developer’s world at large, few of its applications has opened up communication avenues to people who may not have had them otherwise and has enabled far more businesses to operate and communities to grow around the world.

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Gfoxlabs Team
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