Hypertext Preprocessor Script : PHP

In order to have some more additions to our website we have put an effort to incorporate PHP Scripts. PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page but now stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a server-side scripting language, like ASP ie the scripts are executed on the Server. The PHP-enabled web pages are treated just like regular HTML pages and you can create and edit them the same way you normally create regular HTML pages. PHP is relatively new (compared to languages such as Perl (CGI) and Java) but is quickly becomming one of the most popular scripting languages on the internet.

PHP is an open source software which means that it is free to download and use. PHP supports many databases (MySQL, Informix, Oracle, Sybase, Solid, PostgreSQL, Generic ODBC, etc.)
PHP files can contain text, HTML tags and scripts, the files are returned to the browser as plain HTML and have a file extension of “.php”, “.php3″, or “.phtml”

With PHP, you have the freedom of choosing an operating system and a web server. Furthermore, you also have the choice of using procedural programming or object oriented programming, or a mixture of them. Although not every standard OOP feature is implemented in PHP 4, many code libraries and large applications (including the PEAR library) are written only using OOP code. PHP 5 fixes the OOP related weaknesses of PHP 4, and introduces a complete object model.

We can make a PHP script to run it without any server or browser. You only need the PHP parser to use it this way. This type of usage is ideal for scripts regularly executed using cron (on *nix or Linux) or Task Scheduler (on Windows). These scripts can also be used for simple text processing tasks. See the section about Command line usage of PHP for more information.

PHP is probably not the very best language to create a desktop application with a graphical user interface, but if you know PHP very well, and would like to use some advanced PHP features in your client-side applications you can also use PHP-GTK to write such programs. You also have the ability to write cross-platform applications this way. PHP-GTK is an extension to PHP, not available in the main distribution.