PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor)

PHP is a server-side scripting language designed for web development but also used as a general-purpose programming language. As of January 2013, PHP was installed on more than 240 million websites (39% of those sampled) and 2.1 million web servers. Originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, the reference implementation of PHP (powered by the Zend Engine) is now produced by The PHP Group. While PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page. It now stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, which is a recursive backronym

PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Pre-processor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML.

• Features of PHP

1. PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
2. PHP is free to download and use.
3. PHP is an open source software.
4. PHP scripts are executed on the server
5. PHP is a server-side scripting language, like ASP

• Advantages of Using PHP

1. PHP drastically reduces the amount of code required to build large applications.
2. PHP makes development simpler and easier to maintain with an event-driven, server-side programming model
3. PHP pages are easy to write and maintain because the source code and HTML are together
4. The source code is executed on the server. The pages have lots of power and flexibility by this approach
5. The HTML produced by the PHP page is sent back to the browser. The application source code you write is not sent and is not easily stolen.
6. PHP makes for easy deployment. There is no need to register components because the configuration information is built-in
7. PHP validates information (validation controls) entered by the user without writing a single line of code
8. PHP easily works with PHP using data-binding and page formatting features