PHP, What is it?

[sjm1027]

All,

I was in the book store today and I saw a bunch of books on PHP. All I could get out of it was PHP has something to do with creating web pages.

Can anyone please explain to me what it is.

Thanks
Steve

[EzyStvy]

PHP


Self-referentially short for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, an open source, server-side, HTML embedded scripting language used to create dynamic Web pages.
In an HTML document, PHP script (similar syntax to that of Perl or C ) is enclosed within special PHP tags. Because PHP is embedded within tags, the author can jump between HTML and PHP (similar to ASP and Cold Fusion) instead of having to rely on heavy amounts of code to output HTML. And, because PHP is executed on the server, the client cannot view the PHP code.

PHP can perform any task that any CGI program can do, but its strength lies in its compatibility with many types of databases. Also, PHP can talk across networks using IMAP, SNMP, NNTP, POP3, or HTTP.

PHP was created sometime in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. During mid 1997, PHP development entered the hands of other contributors. Two of them, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, rewrote the parser from scratch to create PHP version 3 (PHP3).

[sjm1027]

Thanks for the help
Steve

[mairving]

Funny thing too. Microsoft makes a product called Greetings that saves files in a .php extension. Doesn't have anything to do with the real PHP but funny.

[sjm1027]

Will PHP take over HTML or is it something that works with HTML

[mairving]

Originally posted by sjm1027 Will PHP take over HTML or is it something that works with HTML

It is just a scripting language. PHP will just parse it's code on the fly and display it as HTML. PHP allows you to do many more things like using a database and having conditional statements, just basic programming techniques. HTML will still be around for awhile probably until XML takes over.