INTRODUCTION TO WEB GRAPHICS AND DESIGN
INTRODUCTION · SYLLABUS · TUTORIALS · CLASSLIST
PHP
PHP is a popular open-source, reflective programming language used mainly for developing server-side applications and dynamic web content, and more recently, other software. Originally, PHP stood for "Personal Home Page". Today, the official meaning is the recursive acronym "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor".
Famous examples of PHP applications include phpBB as well as MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia. The PHP model can be seen as an alternative to Microsoft's ASP.NET/C#/VB.NET system, Macromedia's ColdFusion system, Sun Microsystems' JSP/Java system, the Zope/Python system, and to the Mod perl/Perl system
PHP's ease of use and similarity with the most common structured programming languages—most notably C and Perl (and from version 5, Java)—allows most experienced programmers to start developing complex applications with minimal learning. It also enables experienced developers to get involved with dynamic web content applications without having to learn a whole new set of functions and practices.
One of the more attractive parts of PHP is that it is more than just a scripting programming language. Due to its modular design PHP is also used to develop GUI applications (using PHP-GTK), and can be used from the command line just like Perl or Python.
PHP allows interaction with a large number of relational database management systems, such as MySQL, Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL and SQLite while maintaining a simple and straightforward syntax. PHP runs on most major operating systems, including UNIX, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, and can interact with many major web servers. The official PHP website contains extensive documentation. The Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) architecture has become popular in the Web industry as a way of deploying inexpensive, reliable, scalable, secure web applications. (The 'P' in LAMP can also stand for Perl or Python.) Alternatively, the Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP (WIMP) and Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP (WAMP) architectures exist as alternatives for those wishing to use Windows as their server operating system.
PHP is the result of the efforts of many contributors. It is licensed under a BSD-style license, the PHP license. PHP, from version 4, has been powered by the Zend engine