PHP: what is it?

PHP what is it

PHP is a language of programming side server open source than many developers use for development website. It is also a versatile language that you can use to make many projects, including GUIs (MISTLETOE).

What does PHP mean?

The abbreviation PHP originally stood for Personal Homepage (personal homepage), but it’s now a recursive acronym for Hypertext Preprocessor. The first version of PHP was launched 26 years ago. We are now at version 8, released in November 2020, but version 7 remains the most used.

PHP runs on the Zend engine, which is the most popular implementation. There are also others, such as parrot, HPVM (Hip Hop Virtual Machine) and Hip Hop created by Facebook. PHP is mostly used to create web servers. It works on the Navigator and is also command line capable. So if you don’t want to display the output of your code in the Navigatoryou can view it in the terminal.

What is PHP used for?

PHP has two apps main:

  • Server-side scripting. PHP is well suited for developing dynamic web sites and applications.
  • Command line scripts. Like with Python and perlyou can run PHP scripts from the command line to perform redundant tasks like sending emails and generating PDFs.

The advantages of PHP

PHP has many strengths that explain its popularity and significant market share:

  • Cross-platform: PHP is platform independent. You don’t need to have one operating system particular to use it because it works on all platforms, be it Mac, Windows or linux.
  • Open Source: PHP is a free software. The original code is made available to anyone who wants to use it. This is one of the reasons why one of its frameworks, Laravel, is so popular.
  • Easy to learn: PHP is not difficult to learn for beginners. You can pick it up even faster if you already have programming knowledge.
  • Database compatibility: you can easily connect PHP to all databases. data base, relational and non-relational. He can therefore connect in no time to mysqlPostgress, MongoDB or any other database.
  • Community: PHP has a very supportive online community. The official documentation provides guides on how to use the features and you can easily fix your problem if you get stuck.

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