PHP

Overview

PHP stands for PHP Hypertext Processor. PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development. PHP was originally developed by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995 to help with building webpages. Back then PHP was known as the Personal Hompage Page.

PHP gained popularity as a simple alternative to other scripting languaged such as perl and Python. This simplicity enabled web-designers to produce dynamic web pages without a degree in computer science. However, as the world of software moves away from the desktop to online services PHP faces new challenges.

PHP is currently in version 5.2.8 which was released in December 2008. PHP has come a long way since its inception and has evolved dramatically.

Typical Applications

PHP is the most appropriate solution for 9 out of 10 websites. It performs well in a variety of scenarios. Applications such as blogs, forums, Social Netowrking Sites are typical. As a rule of thumb PHP tends not to do so well when it comes to tasks that take time or require a lot of processing. PHP has arguably more security holes when compared with other platforms. This is why PHP tends not to be used to often with e-commerce and banking applications.

Frameworks

There are many frameworks available for PHP. A good comparison is available here at phpframeworks. Here are some of the more popular:

CakePHP
CodeIgniter
FuseBox
Symfony
Zoop

There are also CMS (Content Management Systems) such as Joomla, blueshooes and seagull that have been written in PHP which enable you to create a website in

Server Technology

PHP is processed by Apache. When PHP is enabled in Apache and configured correctly the server interperates the fragments of code embedded in the HTML processes the relevant code and then returns an output, usually some HTML. The famous LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL PHP) may lead you to believe that PHP works under linux only but it is also available on Mac and Windows platforms. Although for serving content it would be recomended to use a linux webserver.