Introduction to PHP

Orgins and Uses of PHP

• PHP was developed in 1994 by Apache group.

• PHP stands for PHP : Hypertext Preprocessor.

• PHP is a server-side scripting language. It is mainly used for form handling and database access.

• It is free to download and use.

Overview of PHP

• The PHP processor works in two modes. If the PHP processor finds XHTML tags in the PHP script then the code is simply copied to the output file. But when the PHP processor finds the PHP code in the script then that code is simply interpreted and the output is copied to the output file.

• PHP is a server side scripting language embedded in XHTML. It is a alternative to CGI, ASP, ASP.NET and JSP.

• If you click for view source on the web browser you can never see the php script because the output of php script is send directly to the browser but you can see the XHTML tags.

• The Extension to the PHP files are .php, .php3 or .phtml.

• PHP has large number of library functions which makes it flexible to develop the code in php.

• PHP makes use of dynamic typing that means there is no need to declare variables in PHP. The types of variable gets set only when it is assigned with some value.

Other Usefull Links:

Installation of PHP On Your Machine? - Click Here

General Syntactic Characteristics of PHP - Click Here

Keywords Used in PHP - Click Here

PHP Data Types - Click Here