What Is PHP?

PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page and was created in 1994 by an independent I.T. contractor named Rasmus Lerdof. Was written as a set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries in the C programming language, he wrote to track visitors to his Web site and to log information about them. Other people rewrote them as a scripting engine that included a Form Interpreter. The revised package was released in 1996 as PHP-FI to reflect its new features.

Developers around the world began contributing ideas and by 1997 over 50,000 Web sites were using PHP-FI for variety of dynamic functions. Two developers, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, were primarily responsible for creating an Application Programming Interface (API) that became the PHP parser, which was released in June 1998 as PHP3. The updated version of PHP4 incorporates the Zend engine so that PHP scripting can be used with any combination of Web server, operating system and platform. PHP is now over 9 million plus domains worldwide. The most recent version of PHP is 5.2.5, released on 9 November 2008.

Originally designed to create dynamic web pages, PHP's principal focus is server-side scripting. While running the PHP parser with a web server and web browser, the PHP model can be compared to other server-side scripting languages such as Microsoft's ASP.NET system, Sun Microsystems' JavaServer Pages, mod_perl and the Ruby on Rails framework, as they all provide dynamic content to the client from a web server.

The Goal!

The stated goal of PHP is "To allow Web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly". Its usefulness includes the ability to read and write files, gather and process form data, send data via email, access and manipulate database records, read & write cookies, maintain data in session variables, facilitate user authentication, provide data encryption and much more.

Advantages of PHP:

In addition to the cross-platform abilities mentioned above, PHP offers speed of execution using only meager system resources so will not slow down the host machine. PHP provides many levels of security that can be set in its initialization file to the desired level. Its simplicity allows anyone with just basic knowledge of HTML to start integrating PHP into their pages straight away.

How does PHP work?

A PHP page will contain a number of elements and functions along with HTML markup code and other textual content.

• When a Web browser (Internet Explore, Firefox, etc.) requests a PHP page from a Web server that is PHP-enabled the server will call up the PHP parser to process all the PHP elements on that page.
• The PHP parser executes the PHP script instructions on the page, generating a HTML document that is then sent to the Web browser as a response to the original request.
• The PHP parser may also be asked to retrieve information from a database.
• The code that is executed on the server, like PHP is called "server-side" code whereas code that is executed by the browser, like JavaScript is called "client-side" code.

To Create a PHP Environment:

In order to run and develop PHP Web pages these three vital components need to be installed on the computer system:

• Web Server - PHP will work with virtually all Web server software, including Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS), but is most often used with the freely available Apache server. The price and its reliability may explain why Apache is by far the most widely used commercial Web server around the world.
• Database - PHP will work with virtually all database software, including Oracle and Sybase, but is most often used with the free MySQL database software for which it has specific optimization. The popularity of MySQL is justified by its speed and scalability, which makes it suitable for deployment on high-traffic Web sites.
• PHP parser - In order to process PHP script instructions a parser must be installed to generate HTML output that can be sent to the Web browser. The parser engine is identical irrespective of the operating systems so PHP pages need no change to run on different platforms.

Windows Platform:

The Windows platform is by far the most popular desktop operating system it is convenient to establish a PHP environment in window to develop and test PHP Web pages. These pages may then be run live on Windows or be uploaded to a Web server running a different operating system.

LAMP:

The acronym LAMP is sometimes used to describes the most popular PHP environment configuration. The initials refer to Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Linux provides the reliability needed for minimum downtime and has robust security.
(Resources for this article by Mike McGrath, published by Barnes & Noble Books, New York and Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

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