PHP Web Development .

PHP or Hypertext Preprocessor, according to Wikipedia, is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document.

PHP has also evolved to include a command-line interface capability and can be used in standalone graphical applications.

PHP Web Development – Static or Dynamic pages?
The main difference between a normal HTML page and one generated by PHP is that the HTML page contains mainly static content and will always display the same content, whereas a page generated by PHP is dynamic and it can be prepared with fresh information, for each individual viewing.

If a page is a static HTML page, when it is retrieved by different users at different times is always the same. If a page is instead created dynamically, it can present different data and layout to different users and in different times.

It should be noticed that in both situations the user browser receives HTML pages, but a static page is read from a server, whereas a dynamic one is created on the fly by the PHP preprocessor.

Javascript is another language that can create dynamic content, but this is done on the client, whereas PHP is a server side scripting language.

A Brief History of PHP

The PHP language was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in autumn 1994 exclusively for personal purposes – and to keep traffic statistics of his site (the abbreviation meant Personal Home Page). The original language was eventually extended to i take data of HTML-forms and to work with databases. Since then, it has developed all the time, and today has become an object oriented tool that can create dynamic HTML-pages. The meaning of the abbreviation was therefore changed and currently means Hypertext Preprocessor.

Currently PHP is available for most operating systems, including Linux, many modifications of Unix (such as HP-UX, Solaris and Open BSD), Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, RISC OS, and many others. PHP includes also support for most modern web servers such as IIS and Apache

Advantages of PHP
If you have a website with many static HTML pages, you will find that they have a lot of duplicate contents such as headers and menus,

If you use PHP you can create functions that can be called in different pages to generate the standard contents.

If in future you decide to change that standard content such as menus and headers, it will be much easier if you use PHP because you will have to change only some functions instead of all the pages..

There are many advantages in PHP Web Development such as:

it is completely free. It’s open source software so anyone can use it in any situation for any purpose.
more than 70% of all websites which run off Apache servers are programmed with PHP or PHP databases (MySQL).
PHP works across a great deal of database platforms like Oracle and Microsoft’s SQL Server.
PHP is considered to be the fastest of the scripting languages, Moreover is extremely stable and secure

Conclusions
PHP can be easily downloaded from the official PHP resource. The scripting language and the interpreter are free and can is mainly used on Linux Web servers. PHP is similar to ASP technology. but is an open source programming language which runs on UNIX servers instead of Windows based servers

PHP has the capability to run on several platforms and also it runs more effectively on the server side.

PHP is quite easy to understand and learn.