Basics Of PHP

Practical Uses of PHP It almost goes without saying that you will want your business website to be compelling, interactive, and secure. All of these characteristics will make your website more effective at bringing in and keeping customers. But how to go about it in a way that is stable, cost-effective, and easy to manage? One popular solution is to use the server-side scripting language PHP to help you solve those problems. What is PHP? Created in 1995, PHP originally stood for "Personal Home Page", however it is now generally understood to mean "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor". It was originally designed to create dynamic or more interactive web pages. It is a widely-used, open-source, general-purpose scripting language. PHP is a "high-level" language, meaning that it's generally more human-friendly (and easier to learn) than other programming languages such as C, ASP or ASP.net. PHP was originally designed for use in Web site development, but rapidly grew to become a much more robust language. PHP's primary use is as an "embedded" scripting language, which means that the actual PHP code is embedded in HTML code. When used in this way, PHP enables your web server to process web pages before they're displayed in the user's web browser.nBenefits of PHP PHP is popular because it can be embedded directly into HTML coding. PHP can be used on all major operating systems and is supported on most web servers. PHP's main focus is development for the web, so it has a quick development time and can solve scenarios much quicker than some of the other web design languages. The latest version of PHP is a very stable and mature language used for web programming much like Java and Microsoft C#. It is open source so it is free! Database: It is very easy to write simple scripts which allow your Web site to interact with a database. Cross-Platform: Both the PHP engine and the PHP code can be used on almost any platform, making it extremely versatile. Development Tools: You only need a text editor to work on PHP; you do not need any development environment or compilers. What can you do with PHP? PHP generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating Web pages as output, however you can also use it for command-line scripting and client-side GUI applications. PHP is an extremely versatile language which enables you to create high-end, stable Web sites with plenty of bells and whistles. Here are just a few of the things you can do with PHP: Make HTML Web Forms Store Information in Databases Remember Web site visitors (cookies and sessions) Work with Arrays Work with Files (File Management and downloads) Parsing and Generating XML (also useful for large quantities of products on e-commerce) Check which browser your visitor is using How does PHP Work? As its name ("PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor") suggests, PHP derives its power by "preprocessing" hypertext on the server side. This generally means that when the PHP script (saved as a .php file) runs on your web server, it performs the programmed actions, and returns HTML code that will then be sent back to your customer's web browser. The PHP script itself is not included in the HTML that is sent to the browser, so the PHP code is invisible and secure to the user. For example, let's consider the following simple PHP statement. (This example is merely to show the basic syntax of PHP in action. Any detailed discussion of PHP code is beyond the scope of this article.)nn