PHP is a recursive acronym that stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. This widely used general purposescripting language is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded intoHTML. What this means to you is that it’s a simple scripting language that can greatly enhanceyour website. You simply learn the code, apply the logic, and create a dynamic website that caninteract with your users on many levels greater than the traditional “flat file” HTML methods ofthe Internet.

PHP’s initial inception in 1995 was a simple set of Perl scripts for tracking Rasmus Lerdorf’sonline résumé. As time went on, Lerdorf began to write a much larger C implementationto handle the increased amount of functionality he needed, including databaseconnectivity. Lerdorf then decided to send out an initial release, open source style, calledPHP/FI for anyone to use and to improve upon. Back in the day, this stood for PersonalHome Page/Forms Interpreter. By 1997, the second release was distributed (PHP/FI 2.0)and had started to gain a following of several thousand from around the globe. Although severalindividuals were contributing code, it was still Lerdorf who continued the majority of alldevelopment.

Mid-1997 saw the dawn of a new age of PHP: PHP 3. This version was a complete rewrite of PHP/FI 2.0 by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, who needed more juice than was previously available for a university project they had been working on. To capitalize on PHP’s growing user base, Lerdorf, Gutmans, and Suraski decided to release this new creation under the PHP name and so started what we know today as PHP. In the winter of 1998, PHP 4 development was begun by Gutmans and Suraski. They released the first official version in May of 2000. PHP 4 boasted much higher performance and pushed new technologies to its ever growing fan base with HTTP sessions, output buffering, and more secure ways of handling user input.

We believe that PHP 5 will knock the butterfly off its flower when it hits. A new objectoriented model coupled with the Zend Engine 2, stack tracing, and exception handling is expected to push a wider acceptance across the planet. At the same time, an introduction of integration with external object-oriented models, such as COM and Java, will throw a wildcard into the mix. For the first time, the ability of other communities to integrate seamlessly with PHP will be available. This means that prewritten APIs will be able to be much more easily integrated with PHP, destroying the last remaining reasons for these other communities to not use PHP.

Why Use PHP?

Simply stated, PHP is the fastest parsing server-side scripting language available. ASP and Java both require separate objects to be instantiated to accomplish almost any task. For instance, in ASP when a programmer uses VBScript, he is running a COM (Component Object Model) object. When he writes to the client, he’s calling the Response COM object’s Write method. When he accesses a database, he uses another COM object. Then when he accesses the file system, yet another COM object is called. Because of this, more and more resources are required to perform tasks. When hundreds or even thousands of users are accessing these pages and functionality, all this overhead adds up fast and significantly reduces system performance and speed. PHP, however, accomplishes all the preceding tasks entirely in PHP’s own memory space. This of course uses drastically less resources.

Features, features, features: PHP comes installed with tons of support for features such as FTP, data compression, file uploads, XML (eXtensible Markup Language), MD5, e-mail, and so on. To enable these features in ASP, you would need to purchase expensive third-party packages. These hidden costs, in our opinion, are simply unacceptable—and those are just the basic options. PHP also offers complex functionality such as dynamic images, IMAP, SNMP, dynamic Flash, PDF (Portable Document Format), native access to Oracle and other DBs, LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), and sockets. Not only that, PHP is actually more mature than ASP. ASP has been around only since 1996, whereas PHP has been in development since 1994.

Last is the cost factor. If you want to run ASP efficiently, you’ll want to run Windows, probably access Microsoft SQL, most likely want Visual Studio, and probably run IIS—money, money, money, and poor performance when compared to Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.

PHP, in a general sense and at its base level, is capable of creating dynamic web pages that incorporate data from databases or other sources not found directly on those web pages. PHP can also be run from the command line and can be used from cron jobs or even for client-side GUI applications, although these last two abilities are rarely seen.

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