PHP which is officially known as ‘Hypertext Preprocessor’ was released in the year 1995. Initially written as a set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) in ‘C’, PHP was originally designed to replace a set of Perl scripts to maintain his Personal Home Pages (also known as PHP). PHP was originally designed to create dynamic and more interactive web pages. It is the most widely-used, open-source and general-purpose scripting language. It is a server-side scripting language often written in a HTML context. PHP code in a script can query databases, create images, read and write files and talk to remote servers. The output from PHP code is combined with HTML in script and the result is sent to the user.

It is possible to use PHP in almost every operating system. PHP can be used in all major operating systems including Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and RISC OS. PHP uses procedural programming or object oriented programming and also a mixture of them. PHP is used mainly in server-side scripting, command line interface and writing desktop applications. PHP also supports ODBC, the Open Database Connection standard which allows you to connect to other databases supporting this world standard. Server-side scripting is the most traditional one for PHP development. In order to use PHP for server-side scripting you need a PHP parser, a web server and a web browser. The PHP codes entered with the parser on a web server will be translated into a PHP page that can be viewed on your web browser.

PHP is a popular language because it can be embedded directly into HTML coding. It has more benefits such as the following - it can be used on all major operating systems and can be supported by most of the web servers. The latest version of PHP development is a very stable and grown-up language used for web programming like Java and Microsoft C#. Both the PHP engine and the PHP code can be used on any platform, which makes PHP extremely flexible.

PHP has many features designed specifically for use in websites. PHP can be used to make your website secure by implementing mandatory sign in feature – asking the user or the administrator to enter a valid username and password. Adding such a feature is easy as PHP can display a HTML form and process the information that the user types in. This ‘sign in’ feature can be an excellent way of getting to know about your customer’s profile.

The popularity of PHP Development continues to grow rapidly because it has many advantages. PHP is fast because the time needed to process and load a webpage is relatively low. PHP is also versatile and it runs on a wide variety of operating systems. PHP hosting is a server-side scripting environment that is used to create dynamic web pages. It is an open source language which is widely used by programmers and web developers. Open source gives a lot of advantages over proprietary programming languages. Due to this reason, PHP has been the one of the most popular server-side scripting language so far. Almost all the hosting providers offer PHP hosting services these days. PHP is especially strong in relational databases, which are used for dynamic content and e-commerce applications.

The article is written by John Wircken. It is mainly based upon PHP Development