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A Brief Write up on PHP Programming, Basic and Advance PHP Programming

What is PHP?

In the world of web-based programming, PHP may appear to be just another alternative to Microsoft's ASP or Sun's JSP. However, PHP has its sights set on making other web-based programming languages an alternative to PHP. PHP's growing popularity isn't just a result of its simplicity but it's flexibility as well. Meaning it can run on virtually any platform. It can be run on Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris, as well as a variety of other platforms. As a result, many companies investing in web development are choosing to use PHP for developing functional web content.

PHP's structure allows it to be easily read and integrated. Whereas a language like Perl, which looks like chicken scratch to the novice programmer, requires it's own file on the server, PHP is structured to be used in conjunction with a web server, and act as a filter that takes a file containing text and PHP code and convert it to another form for display. This allows PHP statements to be embedded within HTML documents, rather than having HTML embedded within PHP. As a result just about anybody with experience in programming is able to look at a block of PHP code and decipher what it is doing.

Another major advantage to using PHP is its functionality with other languages. Many programmers fear the integration of one language with another. However, PHP is designed to mesh with just about any other web-based programming language. For example, just as JSP has the ability to reference Java objects, so can PHP, which means that PHP can be used as the scripting language for activating Java logic. Unlike JSP however, PHP also integrates with other component models, and adding support for new object models is extremely easy. This means PHP's extensibility is limitless. JSP, on the other hand, is completely dependent on Java. PHP is also extensively used alongside Linux, Apache, and MySQL to form the LAMP architecture, a popular trend in the Web industry as a way of deploying inexpensive, reliable, scalable, secure web applications.

PHP is quickly becoming one of the most powerful languages in web-based programming due to the fact that it is easy to use, fully functional with other languages and completely free to use. Since PHP is an open source language anybody can download and use it. Meaning that there are new features and technologies being developed for PHP users each day. As a result there are thousands of pre-written functions to perform a wide variety of helpful tasks. PHP is also considered to be quite fast in terms of compilation and load times. In the majority, PHP will easily compete with both Python and Perl, and usually pull ahead of Microsoft's ASP.NET. When all of these features are considered it is hard to find a competitor to a robust language like PHP.

With such heavy support from web programmers it is no surprise that more and more businesses are choosing to use PHP. The ease of PHP allows it to be understood by a wide range of people, whereas the flexibility of PHP allows it to be used in a wide range of situations. The ability of PHP to combine all of these features with it ability to seamlessly integrate with other languages makes PHP a prime candidate for almost any type of web-based programming.