PHP Introduction


PHP scripts are run on the server and the results are sent to the browser.


What is PHP?

PHP, basically received from Personal Home Page (PHP) Tools, PHP stands for now Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP is a popular, powerful, and widely used open source scripting language that combines dynamic content and interactive web pages with data. PHP scripts are run on the server and the results are sent as plain HTML in the browser. PHP is basically used to create web-based applications.

PHP MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and Microsoft SQL Server can be integrated with popular databases.

  • The php file extension is “.php”.
  • Text, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP code can be written to PHP file.

PHP files usually contain HTML tags and various PHP scripting statements. Below the examples

Code Example:
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
   <title>Code Grope PHP Application</title>
</head>
<body>
   <?php
     echo 'Hello Code Grope!';
   ?>
</body>
</html>

Output:


What you’ll be able to Do with PHP

There are lot more matters you could do with the PHP.

  • You can create dynamic pages and files.
  • You can do everything with files on the server such as create, open, read, write, delete, and close files
  • You can collect information from the web form.
  • You can send and receive cookies to track your website visitor.
  • You can send emails to users on your website.
  • You can save, delete, and modify data in your database.
  • You can control users and restrict unauthorized access to your website
  • You can encrypt data for secure transmission on the Internet.
  • You can create and manipulate Adobe Flash and Portable Document Format (PDF) files.
  • You can Tightly integrate with a wide array of credit card processing solutions.
  • You can connect different types of protocols such as LDAP, IMAP, POP3, NNTP, and DNS.

Why will PHP learn and use?

Easy to Get Started: PHP is easy to learn and use. PHP is designed to structure web development easier and create a new project to make it easy to choose and start with. Those who introduce web developments, PHP is often considered the best and preferred choice of learning scripting languages.

Open Source: PHP is an open source project – Developers are developed and maintained by a global community that provides free source code for free download and usage. There are no costs associated with using PHP for different or commercial projects with future updates.

Portability: PHP will support all platforms on the cross platforms such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS, etc operating systems. PHP is compatible with all servers such as Apache, IIS, etc.

Almost all databases support: Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLServer, MongoDB with the basic 5 databases, can be used in PHP with almost all databases. It is not difficult to integrate any databases, but the drivers of the most widely used databases are set to do automatic PHP.

Support and Community: PHP is getting updated very frequently and is adding new features very quickly. Besides, PHP’s users and communities are very big. Since PHP is supported by the global community, it is very easy to find help or documentation for PHP online.

Note : Some popular websites like Facebook, Yahoo, Flickr, and Wikipedia are built in PHP. Biggest and powerful CMS such as Magento, WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla are also built in PHP.