Some Common Information
| PHP | Hypertext Preprocessor |
| Paradigm(s) | imperative, object-oriented, procedural, reflective |
| Appeared in | 1995; 18 years ago[1] |
| Designed by | Rasmus Lerdorf |
| Developer | The PHP Group |
| Stable release | 5.4.10 (December 20, 2012; 20 days ago) |
| Typing discipline | Dynamic, weak |
| Major implementations | Zend Engine, Phalanger, Quercus, Project Zero, HipHop |
| Influenced by | Perl, C, C++, Java, Tcl[1] |
| Implementation language | C |
| OS | Cross-platform |
| License | PHP License |
| Usual filename extensions | Common extensions .php Older, now uncommon extensions .phtml, .php4 .php3, .php5, .phps |
| Website | www.php.net |
Some Introduction about PHP
PHP is an open source server-side scripting language designed for Web development to produce dynamic Web pages. It is one of the first developed server-side scripting languages to be embedded into an HTML source document rather than calling an external file to process data. The code is interpreted by a Web server with a PHP processor module which generates the resulting Web page. It also has evolved to include a command-line interface capability and can be used in standalone graphical applications. PHP can be deployed on most Web servers and also as a standalone shell on almost every operating system and platform, free of charge. A competitor to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) server-side script engine and similar languages, PHP is installed on more than 20 million Web sites and 1 million Web servers. Notable software that uses PHP includes Drupal, Joomla, MediaWiki, and WordPress.
PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page, it is now said to stand for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
PHP is free software released under the PHP License. From 1995. number of PHP versions has been released which include addition of new codes and various bugs fixes. From that time PHP has released various versions starting from 1.0.0 to latest release 5.4.10. The development of PHP 6 has been delayed because the developers have decided the current approach to handling of instance unicode is not a good one, and are considering alternate ways in the next version of PHP. The updates that were intended for PHP 6 were added to PHP 5.3.0 and 5.4.0 instead.
Beginning on June 28, 2011, the PHP Group began following a timeline for when new versions of PHP will be released. Under this timeline, at least one release should occur every month. Once per year, a minor release should occur which can include new features. Every minor release should at least have 2 years of security and bug fixes, followed by at least 1 year of only security fixes, for a total of a 3 year release process for every minor release. No new features (unless small and self-contained) will be introduced into a minor release during the 3 year release process.
Syntax of PHP : Server Side Scripting
The PHP interpreter only executes PHP code within its delimiters. Anything outside its delimiters is not processed by PHP. The most common delimiters are
<?php to open and ?> to close PHP sections. <script language="php"> and </script> delimiters are also available, as are the shortened forms <? or<?= (which is used to echo back a string or variable) and ?> as well as ASP-style short forms <% or <%= and %>.
In terms of keywords and language syntax, PHP is similar to most high level languages that follow the C style syntax. if conditions,
for and while loops, and function returns are similar in syntax to languages such as C, C++, C#, Java and Perl.
