PHP was first developed in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf as a set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts to track visits to his personal website. Over time, the language evolved and became more powerful, with the release of PHP 3 in 1998 marking a major turning point. Since then, PHP has become one of the most popular programming languages for web development, powering popular websites such as Facebook, Wikipedia, and WordPress.
One of the key advantages of PHP is its ease of use and flexibility. It is a simple language to learn and has a wide range of built-in functions and libraries that make it easy to develop web applications quickly. Additionally, because it is open-source, there is a large and active community of developers constantly working to improve the language and add new features.
Another advantage of PHP is its ability to interact with databases. PHP can connect to a wide range of database systems, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle, making it easy to create dynamic websites that can store and retrieve data.
PHP is also highly customizable, with a large number of third-party libraries and frameworks available that can help developers build complex web applications quickly and efficiently. Some popular PHP frameworks include Laravel, Symfony, and CodeIgniter.
In summary, PHP is a powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use programming language that is ideal for web development. Its popularity and active community of developers make it a great choice for building dynamic, database-driven web applications, and its wide range of built-in functions and libraries make it easy to get started quickly.
PHP code is executed on the server.
What You Should Already Know
Before you continue you should have a basic understanding of the following:
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- PHP is an acronym for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor"
- PHP is a widely-used, open source scripting language
- PHP scripts are executed on the server
- PHP is free to download and use
- PHP is a server-side scripting language that is widely used for web development. It is an open-source language that can be embedded directly into HTML code. PHP is designed to create dynamic web pages and web applications, which are capable of interacting with users and processing data on the server-side. It is used in conjunction with other web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, to build responsive and interactive web applications.
- One of the main advantages of PHP is that it is easy to learn and use. It has a simple syntax and a wide range of built-in functions that allow developers to build web applications quickly and efficiently. PHP is also highly customizable, with many third-party libraries and frameworks available that can be used to build complex web applications.
- Another key feature of PHP is its ability to interact with databases. It can connect to various database management systems like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle, which allows web developers to create dynamic websites and web applications that store and retrieve data.
- PHP has a large and active community of developers, which means that it is constantly being updated with new features and improvements. It is also used by many popular websites and web applications, which makes it a reliable and widely-used programming language. Overall, PHP is a powerful and versatile language that is ideal for web development, and it has become an essential tool for many web developers around the world.
It is powerful enough to be at the core of the biggest blogging system on the web (WordPress)!
It is deep enough to run large social networks!
It is also easy enough to be a beginner's first server side language!
What is a PHP File?
- PHP files can contain text, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP code
- PHP code is executed on the server, and the result is returned to the browser as plain HTML
- PHP files have extension ".php"
- PHP can generate dynamic page content
- PHP can create, open, read, write, delete, and close files on the server
- PHP can collect form data
- PHP can send and receive cookies
- PHP can add, delete, modify data in your database
- PHP can be used to control user-access
- PHP can encrypt data
Why PHP?
- PHP runs on various platforms (Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, etc.)
- PHP is compatible with almost all servers used today (Apache, IIS, etc.)
- PHP supports a wide range of databases
- PHP is free. Download it from the official PHP resource: www.php.net
- PHP is easy to learn and runs efficiently on the server side
- Easy to learn and use
- Highly customizable with many third-party libraries and frameworks available
- Interacts well with databases, allowing for dynamic websites and web applications
- Open-source with a large and active community of developers
- Used by many popular websites and web applications, making it a reliable choice
- Runs on various operating systems and web servers
- Supports many different types of web servers and databases
- Can be embedded directly into HTML code
- Offers a wide range of built-in functions for efficient web development.
What's new in PHP 7
- PHP 7 is much faster than the previous popular stable release (PHP 5.6)
- PHP 7 has improved Error Handling
- PHP 7 supports stricter Type Declarations for function arguments
- PHP 7 supports new operators (like the spaceship operator: <=>)
- Improved performance: PHP 7 is much faster than its predecessors, with up to two times faster execution speeds.
- Type declarations: Type declarations have been added to function arguments and return values, making code more predictable and easier to debug.
- Error handling: The way errors are handled has been improved, with fatal errors being converted to exceptions.
- Anonymous classes: PHP 7 allows for the creation of anonymous classes, which can be useful for creating one-off objects.
- Closure::call(): This new method allows closures to be called as if they were methods of a class.
- Return type declarations: Functions can now declare their return type, making code more predictable.
- Scalar type declarations: PHP 7 now supports scalar type declarations for integers, floats, strings, and booleans.
- Uniform variable syntax: The syntax for variable dereferencing has been made more consistent.
- CSPRNG functions: PHP 7 introduces a set of cryptographically secure random number generator functions.
