PHP – An Integral Part of Scripting

Originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. PHP originally stands for Personal Home Page but now it stands for Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP is a server-side scripting language designed for web development but also used as a general-purpose programming language. There are three main areas where PHP scripts are used.

• Server-side scripting. This is the most traditional and main target field for PHP. You need three things to make this work. The PHP parser (CGI or server module), a web server and a web browser. You need to run the web server, 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.
• Writing 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. PHP-GTK is an extension to PHP, not available in the main distribution.

PHP

PHP allows developers to write extensions in C to add functionality to the PHP language. These can then be compiled into PHP or loaded dynamically at runtime. PHP allows you to interact with your visitors in ways HTML alone can't. This can mean simple things like e-mail forms or more elaborate things like shopping carts that save your past orders and recommend similar products. PHP is a lot easier to get started with than you might think. By learning just a few simple functions, you are able to do a lot of things with your website. PHP is not a proper web standard - but an open-source technology. PHP is neither real programming language - but PHP lets you use so-called scripting in your documents. To describe what a PHP page is, you could say that it is a file with the extension .php that contains a combination of HTML tags and scripts that run on a web server.