PHP Introduction
Evolution Of PHP:
1.
PHP was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 and was
publicly released in June 1995. Back then, it was the abbreviated form of
Personal Home Page tools. After two years, in 1997, it entered public domain as
PHP/F1 2.0. A year later, two programmers, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans,
rewrote the base of the original version and launched PHP 3.
2.
PHP 4, which came out in 2000, incorporated a
scripting engine named Zend Engine that was designed by Suraski and Gutmans.
Three more major versions with some sub-versions were launched in the later
years with the latest version 7.0 released in 2015.
3.
Two decades after its inception, PHP has registered
a phenomenal growth and is still going strong. Today, it controls over 80% of
all the websites on the globe. This includes majors like Facebook, Wikipedia
and WordPress among others.
4.
Internet is a difficult term to quantify it but
let’s put the figure somewhere around a billion websites today, and it is as
relevant as it was when it came to our screens decade ago. websites now have
become more dynamic and less static, making it easy for PHP to develop websites
that replicate the existing state of user engagement. With PHP, Ease of
information and ability to communicate with general public out there is so
easy. Having overtaken languages like the The Official Microsoft ASP.NET
Site or Ruby and still being loved by the world out there.
5.
PHP is used by 82.3% of all the websites whose
server-side programming language we know.
6.
PHP is crazy
among the developers who are trying to shape up the world in their wacky and
colourful coding world. There are more than 20 million websites designed using
PHP which tells about the need to understand its impact on developers and the
coding world in particular.
- PHP
is an acronym for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor", that earlier originally stood for Personal Home Pages.
- PHP
is a widely-used, open source scripting language
- PHP is a server side scripting language designed
generally for the web development. that is used to develop Static websites
or Dynamic websites or Web applications.
- PHP
also used as a general-purpose programming
language. Originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994,
- PHP
scripts are executed on the server
- PHP
is free to download and use.So it is open-source.
·
PHP code may be embedded into HTML, or it can be
used in combination with various web template systems ,web content management
systems and web frameworks.
·
PHP scripts can only be interpreted on a server
that has PHP installed.
·
The client computers accessing the PHP scripts
require a web browser only.
·
A PHP file contains PHP tags and ends with the
extension ".php".
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
- It
is integrated with a number of popular databases, including MySQL,
PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and Microsoft SQL Server.
- PHP
is pleasingly zippy in its execution, especially when compiled as an
Apache module on the Unix side. The MySQL server, once started, executes
even very complex queries with huge result sets in record-setting time.
- PHP
supports a large number of major protocols such as POP3, IMAP, and LDAP.
PHP4 added support for Java and distributed object architectures (COM and
CORBA), making n-tier development a possibility for the first time.
- PHP
is forgiving: PHP language tries to be as forgiving as possible.
- PHP
Syntax is C-Like.
- 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.
- Without
PHP,now-a-days facebook,google are not possible.
- Short
learning curve compared to other languages such as JSP, ASP etc.
- Large
community document
- Most
web hosting servers support PHP by default unlike other languages such as
ASP that need IIS. This makes PHP a cost effective choice.
- PHP
is regular updated to keep abreast with the latest technology trends.
- PHP
has in built support for working hand in hand with MySQL; this
doesn’t mean you can’t use PHP with other database management systems. You
can still use PHP withPostgresOracleMS SQL ServerODBC etc.
- PHP
is cross platform; this means you can deploy your
application on a number of different operating systems such as windows,
Linux, Mac OS etc.
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 handle forms, i.e. gather data from files, save data to a file,
through email you can send data, return data to the user.
- PHP
can send and receive cookies. PHP can access
cookies variables and set cookies
- PHP can add, delete, modify data in your
database
- PHP can be used to control user-access.
Using
PHP, you can restrict users to access some pages of your website.
- PHP
can encrypt data
With PHP you are not limited to
output HTML. You can output images, PDF files, and even Flash movies. You can
also output any text, such as XHTML and XML.
Advantages
Of PHP:
1. Open Source Code & Vast Community: PHP language is open source, so no need to pay a single penny in the
form of license fees. It is developed and maintained by a large community of
PHP developers, where you can find blogs, websites, and forums with various
solutions to different queries.
2. Fast and Furious: PHP is a
fast developer language much appreciated around the world, it is lapped up by
developers who are working around complex problems. With speed being the
critical part, it uses much system resources. This enables the PHP developers
to work swift and get the work done in less time
3. Easy on the Mind: Most of
the developer are quite acquainted with the C language, C is the building block
of all developing languages. PHP uses C Like Syntax thus making it programmer
friendly for the tech wiz and community on the overall. it’s very easy for them
to pick up and it is very easy to create website scripts.
4. Money speaks: PHP is also preferred because
it’s a cost effective solution and it’s capable of operating on both Linux and
windows servers. Another good thing about PHP is that it is capable of
operating on both Linux and windows servers. When we talk about cost-effective
solutions, many people prefer using the Linux servers as they have zero
licensing fees required for associating with the servers. Thus, many agencies
prefer using it for their development.
5. Handling heavy traffic with Ease: PHP can
be used for almost everything that you can do with all other web scripting
languages. The current version of PHP is very robust which gives you the choice
to use whichever language you think will do best. The latest version of PHP has
advanced features for making the language even more robust to be helpful for
using in web programming.
6.Portability: PHP runs on numerous
platforms such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, etc. and it is compatible with all
servers used today such Apache, IIS, etc.
7.Garbage
Collection: Garbage Collector in PHP is used for memory management
and it is used by the PHP programmer when they need to free the memory space in
case of requirement.
Disadvantages
Of PHP:
1.Open source: As PHP comes up with open
source code which benefits our pockets but the code can be accessed by another
programmer as it says open source. If the programmer is professional, he/she
can copy the code of your project and can put it into another project even if
you came up with an original idea.
2.Change in Version: Due to the large
community of PHP developer, new versions appear constantly with the solution
and with new features. Simultaneously if the bug appears which do not a have
solution until a new version is released which can be irking for any
programmer.
3.Debugging
Tool: To find errors or warning in the code you need the debugging tools
which are least available in comparison to other programming languages.
4.NOT
Modular: Not Suitable for large application as it is not highly modular.
Salient features of PHP 7:
PHP 7 is the major release of PHP
programming language. The main aim was to optimize the PHP performance by
refactoring the Zend engine which is successfully done and having PHPNG code
merged in PHP 7 it is 2x fast as PHP 5. PHP 7 release is considered to be the
most important change for PHP.
The salient features of PHP 7 are mentioned below:-
The salient features of PHP 7 are mentioned below:-
1.Performance
Improvement-: According to the Zend team, PHP 7 proves itself
more than twice faster, as compared to PHP 5.6 and HHVM 3.7.
2.Scalar
type declarations:- It has two options i.e. coercive- default set and
no need to be specified, and strict- this mode has to be explicitly hinted. Now
parameters and return type can be enforced which are int, float, bool, string,
interfaces, array, and callable.
Growth
of PHP From last few Years:
The growth of PHP as a technology has been
phenomenal and it has gained great popularity in the industry in last few
years. Here are some of the major websites developed with PHP:-
1. FACEBOOK
2. YAHOO
3. SOURCEFORGE
4. FLICKR
5. WIKIPEDIA
Initial releases of PHP only supported procedural
programming, but these days Object-Oriented Programming is widely used. Though
it doesn’t make any difference in principle, but implementing OOP in your code
enhances code re-usability and readability.