What is PHP ?

What is PHP?

PHP stands for Hypertext Pre-Processor. PHP is a scripting language used to develop static and dynamic webpages and web applications. 

PHP is a server scripting language, and is a powerful tool for making dynamic and 

interactive Web pages quickly. 

• Created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 

• PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page, it now stands for PHP: Hypertext 

Preprocessor, a recursive backronym 

• PHP is a widely-used, free, and efficient alternative to competitors such as Microsoft's 

ASP. 

• PHP scripts are executed on the server. 

What is a PHP File? 

• PHP files can contain text, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP code 

• PHP code are executed on the server, and the result is returned to the browser as 

plain HTML 

• PHP files have extension ".php"

What Can PHP Do? 

• PHP can generate dynamic page content 

• PHP can create, open, read, write, delete, and close files on the server 

• PHP can collect form data 

• PHP can send and receive cookies 

• PHP can add, delete, modify data in your database 

• PHP can restrict users to access some pages on your website 

• PHP can encrypt data 

Why PHP? 

• PHP runs on various platforms (Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, etc.) 

• PHP is compatible with almost all servers used today (Apache, IIS, etc.) 

• PHP supports a wide range of databases 

• PHP is free. Download it from the official PHP resource: www.php.net 

• PHP is easy to learn and runs efficiently on the server side 

Reasons to Love PHP and MySQL 

• Cost 

• Open Source software 

• The PHP license 

• Ease of Use 

• HTML-embedded ness 

• Cross-platform compatibility 

• Not tag-based 

• Stability 

• Speed 

• Open source licensing 

• Many extensions 

• Fast feature development 

• Popularity 

• Not Proprietary 

• Strong User Communities 

Advantages

- PHP is open source and free

- easy to understand 

- simple syntax and big librarys

Disadvantages

- security issues

Syntax:-

<?PHP

//Some code

?>

Example:-

<?PHP

Echo "hello world";

?>

Output:-

hello world