When you have discovered the limits of XHTML, PHP gives you that little bit more without using JavaScript. PHP allows developers to create dynamic webpage’s and is open source free software. PHP is cross platform compatible and can be deployed to any browser on any operating system.
From the very beginning in 1994, PHP was written with web development in mind. In fact it was originally developed to assist and maintain a personal website, hence the name Personal Home Page tools. Robust enough to handle the traffic it processes with the ability to grow as web traffic increases. Over the years it has been redeveloped with the current version being PHP5. Unfortunately now PHP stands for Hypertext Pre-processor, despite such a dull name it is currently used on over 20 million websites with the an active developer community increasing every day. Wordpress is just one application that uses PHP to allow the user to create blogs.
As a scripting language PHP will only do something in response to an event however, unlike other languages such as JavaScript, PHP it runs on server side and not client side. One benefit of this is that the code is pre-processed and never seen by the clients computer.
With a similar syntax as java or perl, PHP provides more flexibility to html, giving the web designer the ability to create dynamic web pages either based on interaction with the user or data stored in the database. PHP can still return HTML to the browser allowing PHP to be the input and the webpage’s to be outputted.
In order to use PHP effectively it is necessary to have a testing server, this can be your computer with a browser that can review files. In order for the sever to understand PHP it is necessary to download a version of xammp.
