PHP In Business (An Introduction)

By: Keith Hearne

One of the Web's hottest server side technologies at the moment is PHP. Recent studies carried out by Netcraft have found that PHP is in use on over 6% of all Web domains in the world (see http://www.netcraft.com/survey), which is surprising when you consider that a good deal of people, even those in the computer industry themselves do not necessarily know what PHP is. Clearly, the rise of PHP has gone largely unnoticed.

What Is PHP? PHP is an Open Source language developed by Rasmus Lerdorf, a then Toronto-based IT-consultant who unleashed the first version of PHP way back in 1994 and then in 1997, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, two developers from Israel, rewrote the core engine of PHP and the language parser, turning PHP into a complete programming language.

PHP borrows its language style and syntax from a number of other sources, including C, Java, Perl, and others while its principles are similar to those of Sun's JSP, or Microsoft's ASP which can all used to create dynamic web content. For many people with previous programming experience, this means implementing their first Web-based application in PHP is a simple affair, as they already have an implicit understanding of how their program should go together.

Why PHP? There are a number of reasons that would appeal to the decision of using PHP.

* PHP is Open Source. This is very beneficial to PHP's notoriety, the main reason being cost. How Much? Nothing! You install PHP and away you go, you're up and running and programming in PHP. Total cost? The time and effort it takes to set it all up. This is what makes this technology very attractive to the hacker mentality that the Internet was built on. Why pay for something when you can get something just as good or better for free?
* PHP performs sophisticated mathematical calculations, provides network information, offers mail and regular expression capabilities, and much more.
* PHP's strongest feature is its database interfacing capability, supporting many of the most popular database servers on the market, including MySQL, Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, Generic ODBC, and PostgreSQL, to name a few. In particular, PHP's interfacing capabilities with MySQL (see http://www.mysql.com) perhaps the most powerful database server found on the market today are very impressive with MySQL having its own PHP API.

So with web based businesses such as Amazon, Xoom and Lycos all using PHP, as well as hundreds of thousands small to medium Web sites. Can you afford not to get clued in to PHP?

A simple download for PHP is available at http://www.php.net. Go surf!!!!
(This article is Part 1 of a 2 part series)