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PHP : Hypertext Preprocessor
by Nazly Ahmed
This is the first article of the PHP articles series that I'm planning to write every month. The target audience ranges from a novice to a professional so I will be taking things off from a very basis level. If you already have a fair knowledge in PHP don't get bored with the early stages of the series since the articles will get more interesting when we have the basics up in place. On this article we will look at where it all started and get some background knowledge about PHP.
Introduction
PHP
is a Server-side scripting language which can be embedded into HTML. It
is widely-used for the development of dynamic web pages and it powers
over 21 million domains in the Internet. It generally runs on the Web
Server and can be used to collect form data, connect to a database,
generate dynamic content, send and receive cookies etc..
How it works
When a request is made to a PHP script, the Web Server will take the PHP script as input and will result the web page as output. Any PHP tag will be replaced by the Server before its sent back to the client browser. So in this case the users won't get the PHP code as a result, but only the output of it. The following diagram and the code below will give you a better idea of how it works.
<?php echo “Hello World”;
</html>
What the end user would get is
<html>
Hello World
</html>
History
PHP was first written by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. It then stood for Personal
Home Page. He initially created PHP to replace a small set of Perl
scripts he was using to maintain his personal homepage. He improved
this to PHP/FI (Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter) that could
communicate with databases which enabled building simple dynamic web
applications. He released his code for everybody to have a glance at it.
Getting interested in Rasmus's work Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans
completely rewrote the PHP parser in 1997. It was released as PHP 3,
changing the language's name to the recursive acronym PHP: Hypertext
Preprocessor. It was officially launched in June 1998. Later they
rewrote the PHP core, which produced the Zend Engine in 1999.
PHP 4 powered by the Zend Engine 1.0 was released on May 22, 2000.
PHP 5 was released on July 13, 2004, powered by the new Zend Engine II. PHP 5 included new features such as improved support for object-oriented programming and performance enhancements. The current stable version is PHP 5.2.8.
Who uses PHP?
If you are a newbie to PHP, knowing who uses it will definitely give you a kick start in using it in your developments. Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, Digg, Wordpress, Drupal and tons of other projects use PHP as their main scripting language.
Licence
PHP is Free Software released under the PHP Licence. Which means you have the fullest freedom to use PHP, study it, modify according to your needs and also you can copy and redistribute it without any restrictions.Installing PHP
Installing PHP is generally easy.
If you are using Windows you can either download the latest Windows binaries or the PHP Source Code from http://www.php.net/downloads.php
and follow the installation instructions. You will also need to have a
Web Server in your system. I would recommend you to download and
install Apache from http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi. You can also run PHP with IIS. PHP’s installation instructions will have this topic in more details.
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