1

CSC 301Web Programming

Charles Frank

PHP– Stands for:

Personal Home Page (originally), PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (now; follows GNU’s recursive naming

convention).– Developed:

Created by Rasmus Lerdorf in ’94 Became later an Open Source project, developed and maintained by

the PHP Group Open Source project = you have access to the source code, and you can

use, alter and redistribute it without charge

– Current release: 5.6.11

2

PHP–What is it?

A server-side scripting language designed specifically for the Web. PHP code:

is embedded within HTML pages; extension is .php is interpreted at the Web server each time the page is visited you can only execute PHP

scripts through a Web server with PHP installed! generates (= creates on the fly) (X)HTML or JavaScript or other output that the visitor will

see on the client tier IMPORTANT: a client will never see the PHP code, only the (X)HTML that the Web server

returns from the script the browser doesn’t (need to) understand PHP (different from client-side JavaScript)!

3

PHP Popularity

• http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_language/all

• http://w3techs.com/

MySQL

• http://www.mysql.com/– “The world’s most popular open source database”

• http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/

Home page for PHP

• http://www.php.net• Search for: phpinfo

Assignment #1

• http://csweb.hh.nku.edu/csc301/frank/info.php