PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a popular and most used programming language for website development. After its release in 1995, a number of web applications were made on PHP. This scripting language is a powerful tool for designing dynamic web pages.
The language is widely used for web development and can be easily embedded into HTML code. Major operating systems such as Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X etc., support PHP language.
PHP is most commonly used in server side scripting, command line interfaces and desktop applications. Various databases like Oracle, Sybase, generic ODBC (Open Database Connection), MySQL etc., are supported by PHP. It also includes external libraries to generate PDF documents and parsing XML.
Because of being an open source language, it is used by a large number of developers, can be easily downloaded, saves time and is cost effective. The time needed to process and load a webpage made on PHP is also comparatively low.
Due to its versatility, PHP development is growing at a faster speed and gaining popularity worldwide. PHP’s main benefit is that it is totally free for website programming development and no investment is required for beginning in web development cycle. Various other advantages of PHP web development are:
- Better performance and reliability
- Development and maintenance cost cut down
- Can be easily embedded into HTML code
- Compatible with servers like Apache and IIS
- Helps effectively in providing content from web server to client
The aforesaid benefits along with numerous others have made PHP an ideal solution for businesses to use it as a tool for their web-based applications. PHP offers better performance, versatility, reliability, faster speed and efficiency as compared to other programming languages, which makes it popular among web developers.
Being free (as it is an open-source software), fast (as it can be easily embedded into HTML) and having the capability to build application compatible with any type of browser, PHP continues to grow rapidly and is being used on 24% of the sites on the Internet. Only a few languages can come close to deliver what PHP can offer.
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