I love PHP

Programming PHP is a practical guide to the open source PHP programming language. PHP is predominantly used as a server-side scripting language for Web applications. This means that it can dynamically respond to user inputs on one Web page and return various different customised Web pages to that user, according to what they have entered or what browser settings they are using. PHP is particularly useful for websites that interact with behind-the-scenes databases. The popular online retail site, Amazon.com, is an example of a Web application built using PHP. PHP is regarded as being a relatively straightforward language to learn, whilst offering plenty of sophisticated functionality to the programmer looking to get things up and running quickly.

PHP is a general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development. It is the fourth most popular computer programming language, ranking behind Java, C, and Visual Basic. PHP generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating web pages as output. It can also be used for command-line scripting and client-side GUI applications. PHP can be deployed on most web servers, many operating systems and platforms, and can be used with many relational database management systems. It is available free of charge, and The PHP Group provides the complete source code for users to build, customize and extend for their own use. As of April, 2007 over 20 million Internet domains were hosted on servers with PHP installed.

PHP primarily acts as a filter. The PHP program takes input from a file (usually HTML) or stream containing text and special PHP instructions and outputs another stream of data for display. From PHP 4 on the PHP parser compiles input to produce bytecode for processing by the Zend Engine, giving improved performance over its interpreter predecessor.

Originally designed to create dynamic web pages, PHP's principal focus is server-side scripting. While running the PHP parser with a web server and web browser, the PHP model can be compared to other server-side scripting languages such as Microsoft's ASP.NET system, Sun Microsystems' JavaServer Pages, and mod_perl as they provide dynamic content to the client from a web server. To more directly compete with the "framework" approach taken by these systems, Zend is working on the Zend Framework - an emerging set of PHP building blocks and best practices other PHP frameworks along the same lines include CakePHP, PRADO and Symfony.

The LAMP architecture has become popular in the web industry as a way of deploying web applications. PHP is commonly used as the P in this bundle alongside Linux, Apache and MySQL, although the P can also refer to Python or Perl. PHP is the most popular Apache module.

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