What is PHP?
It’s like ASP but for Unix. i.e., PHP is a server-side scripting language (runs on the server instead of the user’s computer) that is used primarily on Unix Web servers to create dynamic Web pages. PHP script is written into HTML web pages and when the server reads the page it runs the script which is often used to generate content and then sends it on to the end user. Web pages that include PHP script are usually given a file suffix of “.php” “.php3,” or “.phtml”. You can learn more about it at http://www.php.net.
From the PHP Web site (www.php.net): “PHP is a server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language.” That’s a mouthful, but if we break the definition down into smaller pieces, it is easier to understand. • server-side: This means that PHP scripts execute on the Web server, not within the browser on your local machine. • cross-platform: Cross-platform means that PHP scripts can run on many different operating systems and Web servers. PHP is available for the two most popular Web server configurations (IIS running on Windows NT and Apache running on UNIX). • HTML embedded scripting language: This means that PHP statements and commands are actually embedded in your HTML documents. When the Web server sees the PHP statements in the Web page, the server executes the statements and sends the resulting output along with the rest of the HTML. PHP commands are parsed by the server much like Active Server Pages or Cold Fusion tags.
