PHP Tutorial

• PHP is a recursive acronym for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor".
• It is an open source.
• It is a server-side scripting language, i.e. the PHP script gets executed on the server.
• It is widely used in web development.
• It can be easily embedded into HTML.
• PHP is very much similar in syntax to C or Perl.

How and where PHP is used

• Server-side scripting:PHP is mainly used to make web pages which are dynamic and interactive. There are three things needed for this purpose namely, web server, web browser and PHP parser.
• Command line scripting:This is used when you don't want to use browser or server. Only PHP parser is needed. The script can be executed using cron on Linux or Task Scheduler on Windows.
• Desktop applications:Though not recommended, PHP can be used to write desktop applications using PHP-GTK. This is used specially in writing cross-platform applications.

Some advantages of PHP

• PHP can be used on all major operating systems, including Linux, Unix.
• Most of the web servers can be used including Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server.
• PHP can be used to create dynamic and interactive web pages.
• PHP code can be easily embedded into HTML code.
• PHP is free.

Databases Supported by PHP
Some databases that are supported by PHP are Adabas D, InterBase, PostgreSQL, dBase, FrontBase, SQLite, Empress, mSQL Solid, FilePro (read-only), Direct MS-SQL, Sybase, Hyperwave, MySQL, Velocis, IBM DB2, ODBC, Unix dbm, Informix, Oracle (OCI7 and OCI8), Ingres and Ovrimos.