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What is PHP ?

PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. The endless possibilities of the PHP scripting language and a great community of users have made it one of the most popular open-source languages. For all you people living outside the UNIX world, Open Source means it doesn’t cost anything. You can use it as much as you want and where you want, and nobody will ever charge you thousands of dollars for licenses and support. Even though it was originally conceived as a set of macros to help coders maintain personal home pages, its name grew a lot more from its purpose. Since then, PHP’s capabilities have been extended, taking it beyond a set of utilities to a full-featured programming language, capable of managing huge database-driven online environments.

PHP is cost effective and efficient in programming.
PHP has a very high level of maturity.
PHP is innovative and new generation programming language.
PHP connects technologies and can help you develop "future-proof" systems.
PHP runs on one-third of all worldwide web servers and has a strong community of 4,5 million international developers .
PHP is widely used in enterprises all over the world - and not only for managing web sites.

About PHP

PHP is now officially known as PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a server-side scripting language usually written in an HTML context. Unlike an ordinary HTML page, a PHP script is not sent directly to a client by the server; instead, it is parsed by the PHP binary or module, which is server-side installed. HTML elements in the script are left alone, but PHP code is interpreted and executed. PHP code in a script can query databases, create images, read and write files, talks to remote servers - the possibilities are endless. The output from PHP code is combined with the HTML in the script and the result sent to the user’s web-browser, therefore it can never tell the user whether the web-server uses PHP or not, because what the browser sees is HTML.

PHP’s support for Apache and MySQL further increases its popularity. Apache is now the most-used web-server in the world, and PHP can be compiled as an Apache module. MySQL is a powerful free SQL database, and PHP provides a comprehensive set of functions for working with it. The combination of Apache, MySQL and PHP is all but unbeatable.

That doesn’t mean that PHP cannot work in other environments or with other tools. In fact, PHP supports an extensive list of databases and web-servers. The rise in popularity of PHP has coincided with a 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, 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.

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Why use PHP ?

There are some indisputable great reasons to work with PHP. As an open source product, PHP is well supported by a talented production team and a committed user community. Furthermore, PHP can be run on all the major operating systems with most servers. The speed of development is also important. Because PHP allows you to separate HTML code from scripted elements, you will notice a significant decrease in development time on many projects. In many instances, you will be able to separate the coding stage of a project from the design and build stages. Not only can this make life easier for you as a programmer, but it also can remove obstacles that stand in the way of effective and flexible design.

Well-maintained open source projects offer users additional benefits. You benefit from an accessible and committed community who offer a wealth of experience in the subject, as fast and as cheap as possible. Chances are that any problem you encounter in your coding can be answered swiftly and easily with a little research. If that fails, a question sent to a mailing list or forum can have an intelligent, authoritative response. You also can be sure that bugs will be addressed as they are found, and that new features will be made available as the need is defined. You will not have to wait for the next commercial release before taking advantage of improvements, and there is no hidden interest in a particular server product or operating system. You are free to make choices that suit your needs or those of your clients and incorporate whatever components you want.

Not to mention that PHP has backing of industry giants, including:

Just to give you an rough idea, this is what you can do with PHP:

Desktop applications: PHP is probably not the very best language to create a desktop application with a graphical user interface, but if you know PHP very well, and would like to use some advanced PHP features in your client-side applications you can also use PHP-GTK to write such programs. You also have the ability to write cross-platform applications this way.
Server-side scripting: This is an important target field for PHP. You need three things to make this work. The PHP parser (CGI or server module), a webserver and a web browser. You need to run the webserver, with a connected PHP installation. You can access the PHP program output with a web browser, viewing the PHP page through the server. All these can run on your home machine if you are just experimenting with PHP programming.
Command line scripting: You can make a PHP script to run it without any server or browser. You only need the PHP parser to use it this way. This type of usage is ideal for scripts regularly executed using cron (on *nix or Linux) or Task Scheduler (on Windows). These scripts can also be used for simple text processing tasks.

PHP Popularity

TIOBE Rating of March 2009

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