PHP is Particularly Strong in Its Ability To Interact With Databases

PHP is a widely used open source, general-purpose scripting language. It was originally designed for use in Web site development. In fact, PHP started life as Personal Home Page tools, developed by Rasmus Lerdorf to assist users with Web page tasks. PHP proved so useful and popular, it rapidly grew to become the full-featured language that it is today, acquiring the name PHP Hypertext Preprocessor along the way to represent its expanded abilities — processing Web pages before they’re displayed.

PHP is a general-purpose language that can be used to write general-purpose scripts. Scripts are computer files containing instructions in the PHP language that tell the computer to do things, such as display Hello on the screen or store some specified data in a database. Most scripts contain a series of instructions that can accomplish tasks from designing Web pages to navigating your file system. Because PHP began life on the Web, it has many features that are particularly well suited for use in scripts that create dynamic Web pages. Currently, you find PHP most often hard at work in Web pages, but its use for other purposes is growing.

PHP is particularly strong in its ability to interact with databases. PHP supports pretty much every database you’ve ever heard of and some you haven’t. PHP handles connecting to the database and communicating with it, so you don’t need to know the technical details for connecting to a database or for exchanging messages with it. You tell PHP the name of the database and where it is, and PHP handles the details. It connects to the database, passes your instructions to the database, and returns the database response to you. Major databases currently supported by PHP include the following:
• dBASE
• Informix
• Ingres
• Microsoft SQL Server
• mSQL
• MySQL
• Oracle
• PostgreSQL
• Sybase

PHP supports other databases as well, such as filePro, FrontBase, and InterBase. In addition, PHP supports ODBC (Open Database Connectivity), a standard that allows you to communicate with even more databases, such as Access and IBM DB2. PHP works well for a database-drive
Web site. PHP scripts in the Web site can store data in and retrieve data from any supported database. PHP also can interact with supported databases outside a Web environment. Database use is one of PHP’s best features.

When used on the Web, PHP is an embedded scripting language. This means that PHP code is embedded in HTML code. You use HTML tags to enclose the PHP language that you embed in your HTML file. You create and edit Web pages containing PHP the same way you create and edit regular HTML pages.