PHP is a scripting language which is also a programming language resembling “C” .Scripting language generally does not compile the written code, which is the case with PHP. It is among the very powerful category of programming languages. How scripting languages differ from programming languages? A scripting language does something only in response to events. A programming language does something even when it’s not responding to events. You get the best of both worlds here as it combines the positives of both programming and scripting. JavaScript is an example of a scripting language too; however its falls under the client side scripting language category. Here we are talking about the web server and the user’s browser. The browser is the client side and web server is on the server side. Unlike JavaScript which runs on the web browser, PHP runs on the web server.
PHP is designed to be used with html .It can be embedded with html, used alongside html and in the end return html to the browser.PHP pages will be the input while web pages will be the output. Files need to be ended with a .php extension to let the server know what we are talking about here. This is to ensure that the file is interpreted as PHP.PHP provides a lot more flexibility than html though.Html pages are static in nature. All visitors to the page see the same content with html, while they will see dynamic content when PHP is used. The page content can change based on interactions with the user or data stored in a database. If you know html, PHP can be imagined as turbo charging of html.PHP is similar in syntax with C, Java or Perl.ASP which stands for Active Server Pages is the Microsoft version on PHP.Its free and open source .There are certain licenses and restrictions of course. Being open source is one of the main reasons that it has grown so much. There are various versions available so that you can grab the source code, learn from it compile the language itself.
PHP is quite stable, fast and more importantly cross platform in nature. You can use PHP across platforms windows development server, Linux production server, Macintosh testing server or whatever you like in the same way. There may be slight web server concerns, but for the most part hassles are minimal. The next characteristic is that of no compilation. Being a scripting language, you don’t have to compile it .You just need to put your scripts into the folder where they will get executed on the server side. Your browser displays the results almost instantaneously or depending on how busy that web server is. You can grab the binary files and just install it. Apart from some minor configuration issues, it’s mostly easy to use and get started. There is also an active community where you’ll be able to download open source solutions, extend them and learn from them. A lot of code sharing goes on when it comes to PHP community which is one of the strongest out there. It is a very open community, which is slowly adding solutions that can be purchased. If you want further information on working with PHP and protect your source code check out the following website.
It’s a wonderful language to write scripts and codes using arrays, strings etc. which other languages may have problems with.PHP is also object oriented which is slowly becoming a trend.
