PHP is a widely used open source, general-purpose scripting language. It was
originally designed for use in Web site development. In fact, PHP started life
as Personal Home Page tools, developed by Rasmus Lerdorf to assist users
with Web page tasks.
PHP proved so useful and popular, it rapidly grew to
become the full-featured language that it is today, acquiring the name PHP
Hypertext Preprocessor along the way to represent its expanded abilities —
processing Web pages before they’re displayed.
The popularity of PHP continues to grow rapidly because of its many
advantages:
- It’s fast: On Web sites, because it is embedded in HTML code, the time to process and load a Web page is short.
- It’s free: PHP is proof that free lunches do exist and that you can get more than you paid for.
- It’s easy to use: The syntax is simple and easy to understand and use, even for non-programmers. For use in Web sites, PHP code is designed to be included easily in an HTML file.
- It’s versatile: PHP runs on a wide variety of operating systems – Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and most varieties of Unix.
- Technical support is widely available: You can join one of several e-mail discussion lists offered on the PHP Web site (www.php.net), which cover topics such as general PHP, PHP on Windows, or databases and PHP. In addition, a Web interface to the discussion lists is available at news.php.net, where you can browse or search the messages.
- It’s secure: As long as your scripts are designed correctly, the user does not see the PHP code.
- It’s customizable: The open source license allows programmers to modify the PHP software, adding or modifying features as needed to fit their own environments. PHP provides significant control over the environment, reducing chances of failure.
