What is php?

PHP is a widely used Open Source server-side general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. Its syntax draws upon C, Java, and Perl, and is easy to learn. PHP runs on many different platforms and can be used as a standalone executable or as a module under a variety of web servers. It has excellent support for databases, XML, LDAP, IMAP, Java, various Internet protocols, and general data manipulation, and is extensible via its powerful API. It is actively developed and supported by a talented and energetic international team. Numerous open source and commercial PHP-based application packages are available. Check out the following :

http://www.zend.com/zend/aboutphp.php
Also, the conference slide presentations may help : http://conf.php.net/

At the most basic level, PHP can do anything any other CGI program can do, such as collect form data, generate dynamic page content, or send and receive cookies.

Perhaps the strongest and most significant feature in PHP is its support for a wide range of databases. Writing a database-enabled web page is incredibly simple.

PHP also has support for talking to other services using protocols such as IMAP, SNMP, NNTP, POP3, HTTP and countless others. You can also open raw network sockets and interact using other protocols.

Quite simply the most popular server-side web scripting technology on the Internet with usage growing at 6.5% monthly according to a netcraft survey.

Basically, it is a free software package that runs on your web server. It is specifically designed for creating robust and reliable dynamic web pages for e-commerce and other mission critical web applications. It is also required to run softSWOT software titles such as MailMailer and Form1. If php is not supported by your web server then these software titles will not function.

How do I know if my server has php?

Most commercial web servers currently run php. Most free web hosts do not. If you are running a business web site on a free host consider upgrading so you can really benefit from the opportunities the internet offers business. To determine php status on your server try one of the following:

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Switchbox

By Vic Fryzel

I've developed an application architecture called SwitchBox. It's somewhat derived from FuseBox, but far less cryptic, far faster, and in most cases, equally as powerful. SwitchBox when used properly can help to achieve the ideal application, because it is small, easy to use, fast, and powerful. Ok so let's start looking at SwitchBox.

By Scott Manning

Professional PHP4 Multimedia Programming seeks to be a reference guide for the multimedia aspects of PHP. Giving installation instructions, detailed documentation, in-depth tutorials, and case studies, this book offers a plethora of information on using PHP with GD, ImageMagick, Ming, and PDFlib.

By Jayesh Jain

Your production machine might have PHP installed on an Apache server in a Linux environment, but most of the people (like me) will develop and test their code on a Windows machine before they move their work on to the production machine.

Working on this assumption, in this article I am going to step you through the installation of PHP interpreter under BadBlueWeb Server in windows environment.

By Dejan Bosanac

What we will try to accomplish here is to create unique interface for traversing arrays and to add a little more control over how our objects are created and finally, to support lazy loading.

By Ramsey Nasser

Ok. Your site has recorded the data you want, now you want to display it in an easy to read format. The first method that comes to mind is simply to put the data in an HTML table. Although this is probably the easiest way out, there is a much better way of displaying your information: a graph.

By Insanely Great

As PHP/MySQL developers, we very often see ourselves working on a test server from where we need to apply the changes to the production server. At times, when I am working on deadlines, this job becomes frustrating and I find myself wishing I had a tool to do this job for me. SQLyog 3.x is just the answer.

By Jonathan Griffin

This article is the first in a series of articles that will focus on various object-oriented design topics. In this article we are going to talk about the concepts surrounding abstract classes, situations where they are useful in design, how we can implement abstract classes in PHP, and hopefully some helpful examples to demonstrate the concepts covered.

Article Ideas

Are you interested in contributing an article to the PHP Builder community, but you can't seem to find a topic? Check out our new Article Ideas/Request forum, and see if there's a request for your area of expertise.

Easy way to read database data using fopen()  Dave Minor
Switching between the http to https and vice versa  Siddhu
IIS and Apache running together  Tom Hathaway
Go Away ! Basic safeguard for pages  Peter Garner
Using sessions on various versions of php  Daniel
BadBlue sets up a PHP server on Windows in seconds  Dave Minor
Prevent images from caching  Dustin Schneider

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