BY: ALBERTO CABEZAS 4/19/2010

INTRODUCTION: PHP is considered today as one of the most famous scripting languages. PHP is widely used as a general purpose scripting language, especially for web development. PHP has gained very good popularity and its community is increasing very fast.

What is PHP? PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Pre-processor. PHP is a programming language that allows web developers to create dynamic contact that interacts with databases. Within an HTML page, you can embed PHP code that will be executed each time the page is visited. Your PHP code is intercepted at the Web server and generates HTML or other output that the visitor will see.

HISTORY OF PHP PHP was written in the C programming language by Rasmus Lerdorf for use in monitoring his online resume and related personal information. For this reason, PHP originally stood for “Personal Home Page” Lerdorf combined PHP with his own Form Interpreter, releasing the combination publicly as PHP/FI (generally referred to as PHP 2.0) Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, rebuilt PHP's core, releasing the updated result as PHP/FI 2 and the acronym was formally changed to PHP: HyperText Preprocessor.

HISTORY OF PHP PHP 3 was released, which was the first widely used version PHP 4 was released with a new core, known as the Zend Engine 1.0. PHP 4 featured improved speed and reliability over PHP PHP 5 was released with the updated Zend Engine 2.0. PHP 5 improved object-oriented programming, embedded SQLite, support for new MySQL features, integrated SOAP support, and much more.

HISTORY OF PHP PHP 6 has been in development since October of The most significant change will be native support for Unicode. Unpopular, deprecated features such as Magic Quotes, register_globals, safe_mode, and the HTTP_*_VARS variables will disappear in PHP 6. Today is still in use PHP 5 and Zend Technologies, Inc updates new versions but part of PHP 5 (5.1, etc)

SPECIFICATIONS OF PHP PHP is an open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. Instead of lots of commands to output HTML, PHP pages contain HTML with embedded code that does “something” (in this case, output “HI HOW ARE YOU”). Example

HOW PHP GENERATES HTML/JS WEB PAGES 1. Client’s browser sends an HTTP request (with POST/GET variables) 2. Apache recognizes that a PHP script is requested and sends that request to PHP module. 3. PHP interpreter executes PHP script, collects script output and sends it back. 4. Apache replies to client using the PHP script output just created as the actual HTML output on client’s screen. CLIENT BROWSER PHP MODULE APACHE

Basic PHP syntax PHP scripting block always starts with. The PHP scripting block can be place anywhere in the document. A PHP file normally contains HTML tags, just like an HTML file and some PHP scripting code. Each code line in PHP must end with a semicolon ; There are two basic statements to output text with PHP: echo and print. The PHP file must have a.php extension.

EXAMPLE OF PHP FILE

Basic PHP syntax in the previous example we used the echo statement to output the text “Hello World”. To make comments in PHP we use // to make a single- line comment or /* and */ to make a large comment block. Variables in PHP are use to storing values, like text strings, numbers or arrays. All variables in PHP start with a $ sign symbol. PHP uses many operators to operate on values like +, -, *, /, %, and much more.

ADVANTAGES OF PHP PHP is an open source (FREE). Reduce the time to create large websites. Open up thousands of possibilities for online tools. PHP is a cross-platform compatible. PHP is object oriented. Supports wide range of Databases. It is very useful text processing features, and wide variety of outputs styles. Training is available online and it is very easy to learn.

DISADVANTAGES OF PHP the misperception on lack of support, that there in none, only online community. there are some issues on security. For this reason was founded in January 2005, the “PHP Security Consortium” (PHPSC) an international group of PHP experts dedicated to promoting secure programming practices within the PHP community. Other disadvantage of PHP is that has no formal error handling mechanisms, it is a little tricky to debug

USAGE OF PHP SINCE 1998 PHP has more than 20,917,850 domains and 1,224,183 IP addresses.

COMMON USES OF PHP PHP is very popular for the use in security systems, especially in sites with heavy dependence on database, administrative applications and E-commerce. PHP is used for dynamically changing websites, homepages, templates, and many more uses. PHP can be used for different activities as collect form data, generate dynamic page content, or send and receive cookies.

PHP is prevalent in the industry today Position Apr 2010 Position Apr 2009 Delta in Position Programming Language Ratings Apr 2010 Delta Apr 2009 Status 12C18.058%+2.59%A 21JAVA18.051%-1.29%A 33C %-1.03%A 44PHP9.662%-0.23%A 55(Visual) Basic6.392%-2.70%A 67C#4.435%+0.38%A 76PYTHON4.205%-1.88%A 89PERL3.553%+0.09%A 911DELPHI2.715%+0.44%A 108JAVESCRIPT2.469%-1.21%A 1142OJECTIVE-C2.288%+2.15%A

CONCLUSION PHP is a very popular and useful programming language. PHP has been used for programmers in different ways. The fact that PHP is an open source, gives a lot of access to many people, this contribute to its popularity. This standard is very good in many aspects, and as we see has some disadvantages, however the advantages are more that programmers can work with them and make a very useful tool. We see that PHP has been chosen by many programmers and the statistics show us this reality.