<?php//What is PHP?

?>

Presentation by Helen Pitlick

• "PHP is a server-side, HTML-embedded, cross-platform scripting language—quite a mouthful"

• free and open-source• a way to produce dynamic web pages (sites that

are unique to the user or continuously updated).• clear and easy to read and de-bug, as well as

flexible, scalable, and extensible.• used by 20 million websites and 1/3 of the web's

servers • installed as an Apache module on Unix (Macs or

Linux), or as a CGI script on Unix or Windows

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is....

The father of PHP:Rasmus Lerdorf

invented PHP as his personal homepage in 1994 (version 1.0).

2010 = version 5.3.2

Image from Wikimedia Commons

PHP scripts are plain-text files with PHP instructions; the language borrows from C and Perl, and can be imbedded into HTML. The pages are treated similarly to HTML pages.

image by Wesley Fryer

How it works: you write code, the server reads it, and then replaces it with content in the browser.

PHP is good for....

• supporting 3rd party databases, like MySQL or Microsoft's SQL.

• allowing developers to include files, like GIFs, PNGs, and JPEGs

• companies with lower budgets, since there are no licensing fees or hardware involved.

Uses for PHP

• Feedback forms• e-commerce systems• User registration, log-ins, and online dashboards• Guest books• Discussion forums and message boards

Why is PHP important?

• it's fast (compared to ASP or Java) • it's flexible (compared to Perl or C)• it's open source: a money saver

ReferencesButzon, T. (2002). PHP by example. Indianapolis, Ind: Que. Retrieved April 17, 2010 from http://www.netlibrary.com/urlapi.asp?action=summary&v=1&bookid=81324. (great source for beginners!)

 Lerdorf, R. (2000). PHP pocket reference. Beijing: O'Reilly. Retrieved April 17, 2010 from http://www.netlibrary.com/urlapi.asp?action=summary&v=1&bookid=24671.  The PHP Group: http://us.php.net/tut.php Vaswani, V. (2009). PHP: A beginner's guide. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Php (for an initial overview)