What is PHP | Features, Uses

PHP is a recursive acronym for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor” which is the most popular scripting language used for the web application development today.

PHP is an open-source, interpreted, general-purpose, and object-oriented scripting language whose code run on a web server. Therefore, it is also called server-side programming language. Today, it is widely used to develop static website, dynamic website of e-commerce, and other web applications.

A static website is that website that shows the same and fixed content to every user who visits it. The content is pre-written and stored in HTML files, which are served directly to the user’s browser. A small website with a limited number of pages, such as personal blogs, portfolios, or informational sites, is an example of a static website.

A dynamic website is that website which generates content in real-time based on user interactions. It interacts with the user and provides a rich and more interesting web experience. An example of a dynamic website is an e-commerce website that interacts with database to store and retrieve content, enabling users to select and purchase products online.

PHP is an open source language that is freely available to users for downloading from the www.php.net. Its rich set of features, strong online community support, and continuous improvements make it a reliable choice for building dynamic and interactive websites today.

What Is a PHP Script?

A PHP script is a piece of code written in the PHP programming language that performs a specific task or set of tasks when interpreted at runtime. It can be a single block of PHP code or a function within a PHP file.

A PHP script is usually embedded with an HTML code or document that will be executed each time when the page is visited. An example of a PHP Script is as:

<?php
// A simple PHP script to display the current date and time.
echo "The current date and time is: " . date('Y-m-d H:i:s');
?>

What Is a PHP File?

A PHP file is an entire file which can contain multiple PHP scripts (code) along with client side scripts such as text, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code. It has usually a “.php” file extension. Therefore, you must save the file with “.php” extension.

When the user’s browser request a PHP file, the web server interprets the PHP code within the HTML file and sends the result back to the browser as plain HTML code. An example of file “example.php” might contain:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>Example PHP File</title>
</head>
<body>
    <p>The current date and time is: <?php echo date('Y-m-d H:i:s'); ?></p>
</body>
</html>

From the above HTML code, it is clear that PHP is designed to work with HTML and we can embed into the HTML code like this:

<html><PHP Code></html>

You can create a PHP file without any HTML tags and that is called pure PHP file or script.

What Can PHP Do?

PHP is a robust and versatile scripting language that can perform a wide range of tasks on the server-side, making it a powerful language for web development. Here are some of the key things PHP can do:

PHP can create a dynamic web page that change based on user interactions or other conditions.
It can create, open, read, write, delete, and close files on the web server.
It can collect form data submitted through HTML forms.
PHP can send cookies to the user’s browser and retrieve them on subsequent requests.
PHP can add, delete, and modify data in databases. It supports various database systems, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and more.
We can use it to control user access to different parts of a website.
PHP can encrypt data to ensure its security. It is especially useful for storing user information like username, password, etc.
With PHP, we can generate images, PDF files, and other media formats.

In addition, PHP can output various text formats, including XHTML and XML, that enable to integrate with different types of data and services.

Why Use PHP?

PHP is a popular choice for web development due to its many advantages. Here are some important reasons to use PHP scripting language for both beginners and experts:

PHP has a simple syntax that is easy to learn, especially for beginners.
It is open-source software, meaning it is free to use.
PHP is cross platform, which means it can run on various platforms, such as Windows, Linux, and macOS.
It is a server-side scripting language, which is used to manage the dynamic content of the website.
PHP has an extensive library of built-in functions to perform tasks such as database interaction, file handling, form processing, and simplifying the development process.
It is compatible with almost all popular web servers used today.
In addition to MySQL, PHP also supports a wide range of databases such as Postgres, Oracle, etc.
PHP is faster than other scripting languages, such as ASP and JSP.
It is easy to install and set up for beginners. This is the main reason PHP is the best language to learn.
With PHP, you can create sessions, access cookies variable and also set cookies.
With PHP, you can build forms to collect the data from users, save it into the database, and send back to useful information to the user. For example, registration form.

Who Use PHP Language?

PHP is ranked as the sixth most popular programming language, according to PopularitY of Programming Language. Many of the world’s popular blogs, websites and CMS (Content Management Systems) such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are built in PHP.

According to Web Technology Surveys, 78.1% of all websites, including high-traffic websites such as Facebook, Wikipedia uses PHP scripting language.

Many popular web hosting platforms such as Bluehost, Site ground, and Whogohost run their hosting servers using PHP.

Unique Features of PHP (HyperText Preprocessor)

PHP is a very popular server-side scripting language for the web because of its simplicity and open-source license. There are the following unique features of PHP that you should keep in mind.

1. Open Source:

PHP is an open source, which means its source code and software are freely available to download from the web. A worldwide team of volunteers developed PHP. They provide its source code freely available on the web. Therefore, anyone can use it without paying any licensing fees or investments in expensive hardware or software.

Since PHP is distributed under an open-source license, any developer, anywhere from all over the world, can inspect the code tree, spot errors, and suggest possible fixes. This makes it stable and robust product wherein bugs, once discovered, are rapidly resolved. Sometimes, bugs are fixed within a few hours of discovery.

2. Ease in Use and Learning

The PHP language (i.e. PHP: Hypertext Processor) is an extremely easy to learn and use for absolute beginners. Its syntax is simple, clear and consistent, which borrows is based on other programming languages, primarily C and Perl. If you are already familiar with C or Perl, or C like language such as C++ or Java, PHP will be almost easy to learn and use.

3. Performance

PHP is very fast. The code written in PHP executes faster than those written in other scripting languages, such as JSP, ASP.NET, and Perl. PHP uses its own memory management system, which helps reduce server workload and loading time. As a result, it provides the faster processing speed and better performance for the web applications.

4. Cost

PHP is free available to the users. You can download the latest version at any time from the www.php.net without any cost.

5. Portability

PHP is a cross platform, meaning that it is a platform independent programming language. The code written in the PHP language can run on various platforms, such as UNIX, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, and OS/2. As a result, a PHP application developed on one operating system can be easily run in another operating system without any significant issues.

6. Loosely Typed Language

PHP is a loosely typed scripting language, meaning that it allows you to use a variable without declaring its data type. It automatically takes the data type of a variable at the time of execution based on the type of data it contains.

7. Embedded

The script written in the PHP language may be easily embedded within HTML tags. In addition, we can also use it with various web template systems, web content management system, and web frameworks.

8. Object-Oriented Support

PHP 5 introduced well-designed object-oriented features, which continued to be refined and improved in the PHP 8. If you learned to program in Java or C++, you will find the features such as classes, objects, inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation, and interface in PHP. With these features, you can create more modular, reusable, and maintainable code.

9. Built-in Libraries

Since PHP is well suited for the web, it provides several built-in functions for performing many web related tasks. By writing just a few lines of code, we can generate images on the fly, connect to web, and other network services, parse XML, send email, work with cookies, and generate pdf documents.

10. Database Integration

One of the PHP’s strengths is that it supports all the leading databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server. Besides the MySQL database, you can directly connect to the Oracle, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, and ODBC.

11. Web Servers Support

PHP is compatible with almost all web servers commonly used today, such as Apache, Netscape, Microsoft IIS, etc.

12. Security

PHP is a secure language for developing websites and web applications. It includes multiple layers of security to prevent threats and malicious attacks.

13. Helpful Community Support

One of the nice things of PHP is that it has a large community of developers across the world who regularly update documentation, tutorials, online help, and FAQs with the latest technology trends. You are a beginner or professional, you can take advantage of learning PHP through its communities.

Origin and History

PHP, which is the most widely used server-side scripting languages, started its journey in 1994. A Danish-Canadian programmer, Rasmus Lerdorf, created the first version of PHP in 1994.

Initially, it was a simple set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts written in C programming language, used to track visitors to his online resume. The original name of PHP is Personal Home Page Tools. This is the second version of PHP in 1995.

Over time, more functionalities were added, and other developers began contributing to the project. In 1998, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraki created PHP 3.0, which was the first version and released under the new name of PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. The key features of this version were its strong extensibility, database connectivity, and support for the object-oriented paradigm.

PHP 4.0 released in 2000, brought several improvements, including more object-oriented features, error handling, and several new powerful extensions.

In July 2004, PHP 5 version was released, which was a major milestone in PHP history. This version included additional new features like a complete object model, and access modifiers such as public, private and default to restrict the visibility. This release also introduced exceptions inspired by other programming languages like Java or C++. It also introduced new and more powerful extensions.

For example, MySQLi and PDO extensions offer new functionality for connecting with MySQL databases. Thus, PHP 5 is considered as the first programming language for the web development, which provided developers a great level of control and flexibility, as well as made easy to use.

PHP 6 was never released due to technical challenges and complications during development.

PHP 7.0 introduced several new features as:

Performance improvements
Reduced memory consumption
Increased code execution speed
Return and scalar type declarations
Spaceship operator
Null coalescing operator
Anonymous class declarations
Removal of old functions

In Nov 2019, the release of PHP 7.4 introduced tons of new features and improved performance. The major changes and improvements in PHP 7.4 version are as:

Preloading
Typed properties
Arrow functions
Unpacking arrays
Deprecation of old features
Performance improvements

PHP 8.0 brought several improvements and significant new features to the language. It introduced JIT (Just-in-time) compiler, union types, annotations, match operator, new nullsafe operator, and enumerations.

PHP 8.1 version introduced a great feature fibers which provides the ability to write asynchronous code synchronously.

At the time of writing this tutorial, the latest version is PHP 8.3 which contains many new features such as explicit typing of class constants, deep-cloning of read-only properties and additions to the randomness functionality. As usual, it also includes performance improvements, bug fixes, and general cleanup.

Prerequisite

Having a basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is essential before learning PHP because:

HTML (HyperText Markup Language): It is used to create the structure of web pages. Knowing HTML helps you design static web pages, which is fundamental for web development.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): CSS is used to style and layout of web pages, looking them more attractive. It allows you to apply styles, such as colors, fonts, and spacing to HTML elements.

JavaScript: JavaScript is a scripting language used to create interactive effects within web browsers. It helps in adding dynamic behavior to web pages, such as form validation, animations, and user interaction.

Understanding these technologies provides a solid foundation for learning PHP, which is a server-side scripting language used to develop dynamic web pages and interact with databases.

As we have known what is PHP, and its uses, features in this tutorial. In addition to it, you have understood the origin and history of PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. I hope that you will have understood the basic points and enjoyed reading!!!