PHP is known as Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document. As a general-purpose programming language, PHP code is processed by an interpreter application in command-line mode performing desired operating system operations and producing program output on its standard output channel. It may also function as a graphical application. PHP is available as a processor for most modern web servers and as standalone interpreter on most operating systems and computing platforms.
PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page. It began in 1994 as a set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries written in the C programming language. PHP is a powerful tool for making dynamic and interactive Web pages. PHP is the widely-used, free, and efficient alternative to competitors such as Microsoft's ASP.
PHP is also used to create textual user interfaces. The web developers can easily share and edit PHP scripting language and this is one of the major advantages of using PHP programming.
PHP is easy to understand and learn, especially for those with backgrounds in programming such as C, javascript and HTML. The language is similar to C and Perl so that anyone with a background in either C or Perl programming will feel comfortable using and understanding PHP. PHP also runs on just about every platform including most UNIX, Macs and Windows versions.
Benefits of Using PHP Programming:
There are many advantages for which PHP programming and MYSQL are widely used nowadays. Following are some of the main benefits of using PHP for programming the websites:
- Maintenance cost is low.
- PHP is reliable, fast speed and high performance programming language.
- Can be run on operating systems like Windows, Linux and Unix.
- Multilingual support is available on PHP.
- It is compatible with various servers like IIS and Apache.
- It work as support for other databases.
- PHP is easy to debug
For PHP MySQL web development, MySQL is used as back end with PHP programming. MySQL offers cross platform support to PHP and helps the web developer to create a faster data management system. Since PHP and MySQL are very much compatible with each other, PHP is used as a scripting language in MySQL development. In PHP development, MySQL also supports multiple users at the same time. With custom PHP programming, images, texts and form tables can be added to a site as and when required. The existing texts and images on a website can be customized and changed as the design demands.
The Advantages of PHP
PHP is one of the most popular server side scripting languages running today. It is used for creating dynamic webpages that interact with the user offering customized information. PHP offers many advantages; it is fast, stable, secure, easy to use and open source (free).
