PHP Hosting First Contact!Are you a Web developer who’s breaking out from just CSS and HTML and wants to learn a language to give their website a little more dynamic power. Or you’re a Web hosting company that has been getting lots of emails from your customers that are asking you if you support PHP. Or maybe, you’ve been working with other languages and want to know what the big fuss is about this dynamic scripting language called PHP.
PHP originally started as a side project of Rasmus Lerdorf, a developer who had been doing Web and Internet work with Perl and C and was looking for an easier way to connect up databases to websites. Originally PHP stood for Personal Home Pages, but as time move on the initials have come to stand for “PHP: Hypertext Pre-processor”. Rasmus is still today one of the driving forces behind the development of the language, but the team of contributors is now quite large.
According to the experts from the main site, “PHP recursive acronym for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development which can be embedded into HTML.” It’s most common use is to act as a Web-based front-end for database content. It’s also been described as a rapid-deployment tool for Web applications since the learning curve is not very steep. Since it is a scripting language, there is no need to compile code (like you would with Java) so it allows you to quickly try out ideas.
An basic example of what PHP looks like,
<html>
<head>
<title>Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php
echo "Hi, I'm a Basic PHP example!";
?>
</body>
</html>
The first thing you will notice is how this is different from a script written in other languages like Perl or C -- instead of writing a program with lots of commands to output HTML, you write an HTML script with some embedded code to do something (in this case, output some text). The PHP code is enclosed in special start and end tags that allow you to jump into and out of "PHP mode".
What distinguishes PHP from something like client-side JavaScript is that the code is executed on the server. If you were to have a script similar to the above on your server, the client would receive the results of running that script, with no way of determining what the underlying code may be. You can even configure your web server to process all your HTML files with PHP, and then there's really no way that users can tell what you have up your sleeve.
The best thing about using PHP are that it is extremely simple for a newcomer, but offers many advanced features for a professional programmer. Don't be afraid if reading a long list of PHP's features. You can jump in, in a short time, and start writing simple scripts in a few hours.
Although PHP's development is focused on server-side scripting, you can do much more with it. Watch out for more PHP related articles to be published.
