Nowadays, PHP is used for both the ‘Personal Home Page’ and ‘Professional Home Page’ development of website applications and pages.

PHP – Hypertext Pre-Processor

Features

• Simple: easy-to-use
• Open Source: free
• Server-side scripting language: Applications run on a server. The code contains HTML and PHP code placed between ‘<?PHP’ and end ‘?>’ tags.
• Programming Style: Procedural or Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)
• Powerful: fast to implement, logic and commands similar to C language
• Development Environment: Linux, UNIX (HP UX, Open BSD, Solaris) Windows, Mac OS, RISC OS
• Supported Web Servers: Apache, IIS, FastCGI (Lighttpd & Nginx)
• Secured
• Flexible: Almost 75% of websites are designed using PHP which includes Facebook, Yahoo
• Web Development Features: dynamic content, sending & receiving cookies.
• Database Support: Supports a wide range of databases and their functions like MySQL to retrieve, edit, delete, and many more operations. Supports Abstraction layer such as PDO or database connect using Open Database connection via ODBC. Connect to other databases via cURL or sockets like CouchDB.
• Support connections with other servers to create raw network connections using protocols like HTTP, LDAP, IMAP, NNTP, PoP3
• Writing desktop applications using a graphical interface
• Word Processing or Text Processing which includes regular expressions, XML document interpretation, and access. Generate and display text from XHMTL or XML files.
• Advanced Features: Can work as a web-server module or CGI interpreter, executing code using Cron-tables in Linux or Task Scheduler on Windows (such scripts run from the command line using PHP interpreter), creating image & PDF files, make video adjustments.