PHP Hosting First Contact (Part 2)

What are PHP Capabilities?

The beauty of PHP is it can basically do anything. PHP focuses on server-side scripting, so you can do anything any other CGI program can do, such as collect form data, generate dynamic page content, or send and receive cookies. Web designers beware as PHP can do lots lots more.

The following are typical examples for when PHP scripting is generally used

Writing desktop applications.  PHP I wouldn’t recommend to be the easiest or best language to create a desktop application with a graphical user interface, however if you know PHP very well, and would like to use some advanced PHP features in your client-side applications PHP-GTK is your answer. You also have the ability to write cross-platform applications this way. PHP-GTK is an extension to PHP, not available in the main distribution.

Server-side scripting. This is the main target field for PHP. You need three things to make this work. The PHP parser (CGI or server module), a webserver and a web browser. You need to run the webserver, with a connected PHP installation. You can access the PHP program output with a web browser, viewing the PHP page through the server. All these can run on your home machine if you are just experimenting with PHP programming.

Command line scripting. You can make a PHP script to run it without any server or browser. You only need the PHP parser to use it this way. This type of usage is ideal for scripts regularly executed using cron (on *nix or Linux) or Task Scheduler (on Windows). These scripts can also be used for simple text processing tasks.

The major operating systems compatibale with PHP, include Linux, many Unix variants (including HP-UX, Solaris and OpenBSD), Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, RISC OS, and more. PHP has also support for most of the web servers today. This includes Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server, Personal Web Server, Netscape and iPlanet servers, Oreilly Website Pro server, Caudium, Xitami, OmniHTTPd, and many others. For the majority of the servers PHP has a module, for the others supporting the CGI standard, PHP can work as a CGI processor.

What you can get with PHP,

·         The freedom of choosing an operating system and a web server.

·         The choice of using procedural programming or object oriented programming, or a mixture of them.  Many code libraries and large applications (including the PEAR library) are written only using OOP code.

·         With PHP you are not limited to output HTML, . PHP's abilities includes outputting images, PDF files and even Flash movies (using libswf and Ming).You can also output easily any text, such as XHTML and any other XML file.

·         PHP can autogenerate these files, and save them in the file system, instead of printing it out, forming a server-side cache for your dynamic content