Introduction
The full form of PHP is Personal Home Page. It is an HTML-embedded, server-side scripting language designed for web development. The inventor of PHP is Rasmus Lerdorf and invented in 1994 and appeared in the market in 1995. PHP is also known as hypertext processor. PHP is an open source software and it is free to download and use.
PHP is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. It supports various databases like MySQL, Oracle, Sybase, Solid, PostgreSQL, Informix etc.
History
PHP was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 and was publicly released in June 1995. Back then, it was the abbreviated form of Personal Home Page tools. After two years, in 1997, it entered public domain as PHP/F1 2.0. A year later, two programmers, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, rewrote the base of the original version and launched PHP 3.
PHP 4, which came out in 2000, incorporated a scripting engine named Zend Engine that was designed by Suraski and Gutmans. Three more major versions with some sub-versions were launched in the later years with the latest version 7.0 released in 2015.
Two decades after its inception, PHP has registered a phenomenal growth and is still going strong. Today, it controls over 80% of all the websites on the globe.
Specimen for writing PHP:
https://gist.github.com/anonymous/ce0a1677ee3b9a64b146618daa607965
Main Scope of PHP
The main goal of PHP is to allow web developer to create dynamically generated pages quickly. It is also used as a general purpose programming language. It is basically used for developing web based software applications.
Characteristics of PHP
- Simplicity
- Efficiency
- Security
- Flexibility
- Familiarity
Uses of PHP
- PHP performs system functions, i.e. from files on a system it can create, open, read, write, and close them.
- PHP can handle forms, i.e. gather data from files, save data to a file, through email you can send data, return data to the user.
- We add, delete, modify elements within our database through PHP.
- It access cookies variables and sets cookies.
- Using PHP, we can restrict users to access some pages of our website.
- It can encrypt data.
Advantages of PHP
1) Free of Cost: PHP is open source and all its components are free to use and distribute.
2) Platform independent: PHP is platform independent and can be run on all major operating systems.
3) Compatible with almost all servers: PHP is compatible with almost all servers used today.
4) Secure: PHP has multiple layers of security to prevent threats and other malicious attacks.
5) Easy to learn: PHP has a very easy and understandable syntax. Its codes are based on C, C++ and embedded with HTML so it is very easy to learn for a programmer.
Is PHP really important? Why?
Yes, PHP is really important because it is compatible with almost all servers used today. It is very flexible and has a lot of innovative features. Using PHP, we can restrict users to access some pages of our website. It is the fastest resource available for creating database–enabled dynamic websites. All the features and updates of PHP are available free of cost. It works on all major operating systems like Linux, Windows, Unix and Mac OS.
