What is PHP?

Many of us have heard the term PHP but do not know what is PHP? PHP is one of the most popular and widely used scripting languages for the development of web pages. Working with PHP scripts is fairly easy if your server supports it. All you need to do is create your files with .php extensions and upload them to your web directory. The server will take these files and parse them without any extra compilation steps.

PHP is used for server-side web development and hence is deployed on web servers, operating systems and platforms. PHP is a free software and also has a command line interface. It is packed with multiple features that provide enough controls if you want to move into advanced programming.

How to Use PHP? The main areas where PHP is used are:

• Server side scripting: Most widely used, where you can run the web server with PHP support and create dynamic pages
• Command Line support: Run the PHP script without any browser. In this case you will only need PHP parser.
• Desktop applications: PHP is not very widely used for desktop applications but an advanced programmer can use it with separately available PHP programs like PHP-GTK.

Features of PHP The following are the major feature sets and functionalities supported by PHP:

• The operating systems supported by PHP are Linux, UNIX variants, MS Windows, MAC and RISC.
• Most web servers support PHP like, Apache, IIS, and any server that utilizes Fast CGI PHP binary.
• You have the flexibility of many outputs like, HTML, images, PDF files, Flash movies, XHTML or XML files. There are many databases supported including DBA, ODBC, MySQL and many more.
• PHP can use variety of communication protocols like, LDAP, IMAP, SNMP, NNTP, POP3, COM and many others to communicate with other services.
• Text processing features are very useful where PHP standardizes all XML extensions on libxml2.

PHP Against Other Web Programming Languages ASP – ASP is used only on the Microsoft Information Server (IIS) Platform. This is one of its major limitations. If you are using IIS platform, ASP comes by default and might be a good starting point but you will need to buy additional components for advanced programming.
ColdFusion – It is available only on Windows, Solaris, Linux, MacOS and AIX. An excellent competitor initially but the latest PHP version matches its performance on error handling, database abstraction and date parsing.

Perl – Perl can get a little complex if you are a beginner with programming scripts. Moreover, PHP offers all the ‘needed’ functionalities that Perl has to offer and is easier to work with.

PHP script is the best method to move forward with website creation. If your web server supports PHP, you are good to go already, if not, you will need to install PHP. Installation and download is free. You will also need a supported database. A free MySQL database is available online and the last step is to have a server. You can download and use Apache server for free.

Visit the Web Design FAQ section of Flying Cow Design for more information on PHP