A Short Description Of PHP

[vicky99 0]

Dear FriendsI would like to discuss something about PHP. Many of you might know and many unknown from it. So please read it carefully then form a conception about it.PHPPHP is a scripted programming language that can be used to create dynamic websites. PHP- officially stands for ' PHP HYPERTEXT PREPROCESSOR' yet many people still know it by its original name , Personal Home Page. It is an open source, cross platform, programming language used mainly for developing server-side applications and dynamic web contents and more recently a broader range of software application.PHP offers something for everyone. It's evolved out of both C++ abd java abd delivers best of both the worlds. PHP allows interaction with a large number RDBMS, such as, MySQL ,Oracle,Ms SQL Server ect. It runs on most of the OS and supports majority of web Servers.PHP provides a command line interface(CLI), as well as GUI libraries such as Gimp Tool Kit and tex mode libraries like Ncurses and Newt.Moreover, the industry leaders like Yahoo! are swithching to PHP. Rasmus Lerdorf is the man who created it. He named it PHP/FI -Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter. Later Zeev Suraski and Andi Gytmans rewrite.Prerequisite for learning PHP:-An intermidiate level HTML programmer can learn PHP easily. Howerver, people with previous programming experience specially C,C++ and Java will find it more easier to learn

[Houdini 0]

What I like about PHP is that it is a server side like Perl and unlike JavaScript (by Netscape) or JScript (by Microsoft) it will always work and is not dependant on what settings are on a users browser. It also works on all OS's unlike ASP which requires a Windows environment.

It has many built in functions and if you actually download the PHP manual to your local machine (and possibly also set up a server with PHP and possibly MySQL) you can test all the functions out right from the manual from the examples or user contributed notes provided.

I use JavaScript where needed but mostly all my web design is PHP. I do notice that alot of people have bad habits though when using PHP they will echo or print out HTM when all they need to do is leave PHP by closing it then the browser will (as directed by the webserver go back into HTML mode) render the HTML content without all the escapes from double quotes and so forth.

I also see those that will open PHP and just start a session then close it and then immediately reopen PHP and write more script (why this happens I never have figured out, plus it could cause an error with crappy code). I think PHP will eventually be the language of choice over Jave even or Perl as ist is getting better all the time and has almost full implementation of OOP with PHP5. Using either mysql or mysqli with PHP5 make life much easier for example here are two code to connect to a database one using MySQL normally (till PHP5) and MySQLi.
my_sql() PHP code

$connect = mysql_connect($host,$user,$password);$db = mysql_select_db($databse,$connect);

mysqli_connect() PHP code

$connect =mysqli_connect($host,$user,$password,$database);

Hmmm just one statement here...NEAT!
Edited May 29, 2006 by Houdini (see edit history)