"Welcome to our PHP 101 blog, where we demystify the world of web development. "

Sunday, June 10, 2018

What is PHP


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:-

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.






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