subject: Why Learn PHP? [print this page] PHP is a general-purpose scripting language widely used, especially designed for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. It generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating web pages as output. It can be deployed on most web servers and on almost all operating systems and platforms at no cost.
PHP is installed in more than 20 million websites and servers in a million, the number of sites in PHP has shared some of its prominent site with new languages are not so powerful since August 2005.
It is also the most popular Apache module among computers using Apache as the web server. The latest version of PHP is 5.3.2 (for Windows) of 04 March 2010.
The PHP has great resemblance with the common language of structured programming, like C and Perl, allows the most complex developers to create applications with a very short learning curve. It also allows them to engage with dynamic content applications without having to learn a whole new set of functions.
Although everything in its design is intended to facilitate the creation of web page, you can create applications with graphical user unainterfaz using PHP extension php-gtk or QT. It can also be used from the command line, in the same way as Perl or Python can do it, this version of PHP is called PHP CLI (Command Line Interface).
When the client requests the server to send you a website, the server runs PHP elinterprete. This script processes the request will generate dynamic content (eg getting information from a database).
The result is sent to the server by the interpreter, who in turn sends it to the client. By extension it is also possible to generate PDF files, Flash and images in different formats.
Allows connection to different types of database servers such as MySQL, Progres, Oracle, ODBC, DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Firebird and SQLite.
XAMPP is a standalone server platform, free software, which consists mainly of the MySQL database, Apache Web server and interpreters for scripting languages: PHP and Perl. The name comes from the acronym for X (for any of the different operating systems), Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl.
The program is released under the GNU and acts as a free Web server, easy to use and able to read dynamic pages. Currently, XAMPP is available for Microsoft Windows, GNU / Linux, Solaris, and MacOS X.
PHP also has the ability to be implemented in most operating systems such as UNIX (and such as Linux or Mac OS X) and Windows and can interact with the most popular web servers and CGI version exists, module for Apache, isapi.
PHP is an alternative to Microsoft technologies Asp yASP.NET (using C # vb.net as languages), a company ColdFusion Adobe (formerly Macromedia), JSP / Java from Sun Microsystems, and CGI / Perl. Although its creation and development is in the field of open systems under the GNU license, there is also an IDE (integrated devel environment) mall called Zend Studio.
Recently, CodeGear (the division of programming languages Borland) has released an integrated development environment for PHP, called Delphi for PHP. There is a module for Eclipse, one of the most popular IDE. For all these reasons importnate take time to learn php.
