What is PHP? – QuICT Tech

PHP is a popular widely used open sours general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmux Lenderhof in 1994^. the PHP is now produced by The PHP Group. PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page, but it now stands for the PHP: Hypertext Pre-processor.

<pre class="wp-block-syntaxhighlighter-code"><!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>Example</title>
    </head>
    <body>

        <?php
            echo "Hi, I'm a PHP script!";
        ?>

    </body>
</html></pre>

What distinguishes PHP from something like client-side JavaScript is that the code is executed on the server, generating HTML which is then sent to the client. The client would receive the results of running that script, but would not know what the underlying code was. You can even configure your web server to process all your HTML files with PHP, and then there’s really no way that users can tell what you have up your sleeve.

The best things in using PHP are that it is extremely simple for a newcomer, but offers many advanced features for a professional programmer. Don’t be afraid reading the long list of PHP’s features. You can jump in, in a short time, and start writing simple scripts in a few hours.

Although PHP’s development is focused on server-side scripting, you can do much more with it. Read on, and see more in the What can PHP do? section, or go right to the introductory tutorial if you are only interested in web programming.

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“

What Can PHP Do?

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

With PHP you are not limited to output HTML. You can output images, PDF files, and even Flash movies. You can also output any text, such as XHTML and XML.