What is PHP?

What is PHP?

On my last post, I have mentioned about learning php. So today, I want to say little bit of PHP and what it does.

PHP is scripting language that produce dynamic web pages. It can be embedded into HTML and generally runs on a web server, which needs to be configured to process PHP code and create web page content from it. PHP is platform independence which means it can run on Window, Linux, Mac Ox and it is one of PHP’s strongest features as well as its support for a wide range of databases.

PHP can be used on most web servers and on almost every operating system and platform free of charge. PHP is installed on over 20 million websites and 1 million web servers. PHP is free software released under the PHP License, which is incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL) because of restrictions on the use of the term PHP. PHP has evolved to include a command line interface capability and can also be used in standalone graphical applications.

Information source:Wikipedia Org

PHP is mainly focused on server-side scripting, such as collect form data, generate dynamic page content, or send and receive cookies.

Server-side scripting is the most traditional way of using PHP. You need to run the web server, with PHP support. You can also use on comand line to run automatic schedule such as Task Scheduler (on Windows) or text processing.You can make a PHP script to run it without any server or browser. You can right desktop application with PHP but you need to use different features that are not include in normal installation setups. This is for advanced programmers who knows PHP very well to write client-side application, then have to use PHP-GTK or WinBinder is a (Windows only).

PHP is cross platform which means it can be used on all major operating systems, including Linux, many Unix variants (including HP-UX, Solaris and OpenBSD), Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X. PHP has also support for most of the web servers today. This includes Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server, Personal Web Server. For the majority of the servers, PHP has a module, for the others supporting the CGI standard, PHP can work as a CGI processor.

With PHP you are not limited to output HTML. PHP's abilities includes outputting images, PDF files and even Flash movies (using libswf and Ming) generated on the fly. You can also output easily any text, such as XHTML and any other XML file. PHP can auto generated these files, and save them in the file system, instead of printing it out, forming a server-side cache for your dynamic content.

So what PHP can do is convert a static website into a dynamic website on the fly so to speak.

Information source and more information, visit PHP Net