A
b o u t P H P
Php
originally stood for "Personal Home Page" as created
in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf to track visitors to his online resume.
As its usefulness and capabilities grew, it came to mean "PHP:
Hypertext Preprocessor."...reflecting the fact that PHP handles
data before it becomes HTML. According to the official
PHP Website, PHP is a server-side, cross-platform, HTML-embedded
scripting language. As
an HTML-embedded language, PHP can be placed within
HTML code such as that utilized to prepare the pages in this
website. It should also be pointed out that PHP is a scripting
language, as opposed to a programming language, like Java, the
varieties of 'C', and Perl. The latter programming languages can
produce stand-alone application either web-based or not, unlike
PHP.
Server-side
refers to the fact that everything PHP does occurs on the server
as opposed to on the client, as in the case of Java scripts and
applets, for example. The server reads the PHP code and processes
it according to its scripted directions. By using PHP you can
have the server dynamically generate the HTML code. As a cross-platform
language, PHP is highly portable, meaning it can operate on many
server systems, including Unix, Windows, and MacIntosh.
We
have utlized PHP to create the feedback form on the Contact page,
but it can be used in many situations calling for dynamic presentation
of information, from statistical matrices of web visitors to creation
of e-commerce sites. It is increasingly being used to access databases
such as mySQL, and the pairing of PHP with mySQL is increasing
dramatically in popularity for its relative simplicity in production
and the speed at which instructions are processed.
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