PHP is a programming language. It is strongly recommended to have some programming experience to be comfortable with PHP. If you are already programming and have had the opportunity to manipulate languages such as C or Javascript, it will be easy for you to follow the PHP course. Knowledge of HTML is also required. But if you are a novice in the programming world, PHP might need more of your time and effort to be mastered. This is especially evident when dealing with tasks of high complexity, so looking for professional programming assignment help, in this case, is a very timely and faithful decision.
A little history
In 1994, following a personal project, Rasmus Lerdorf created the PHP language, which stood for Personal Home Page. This project was driven by his need to track visitors to his CV online on his website. In 1997 Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans began work on improving the PHP language.
The first official version was named PHP3, whose recursive acronym now stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. Shortly after, they developed the Zend Engine, after which version 4 of PHP was born. In 2004, PHP5 was created. This language version supports Object Oriented Programming (OOP) in a very advanced way. This version has been used for a long time on web servers of hosting companies, and even today, version 5.6 is still available on most shared hosting servers. The successor of PHP5 is PHP7, finalized in December 2015 at the expense of PHP6, which was never official.
PHP is inspired mainly by three programming languages, namely C, Perl, and Java (whose object model was used as a basis for developing PHP5). Other languages, such as Shell and C++, have also influenced some aspects of PHP.
Since its beginnings, PHP has interested more developers and is used to create millions of dynamic Web sites.
What is a dynamic website?
In general, websites can be grouped into two categories: static websites and dynamic websites. A static website contains fixed content that does not change automatically and remains the same until the webmaster intervenes to modify it manually.
A dynamic website, meanwhile, is a website whose content changes autonomously. This one can vary according to the date, the navigator used by the customer, the geographical position of this one, the privileges allotted to each user following an authentication, for example, the history of navigation, etc.
The dynamic sites are based on languages known as CGI (for Common Gateway Interface), of which PHP is part.
Particularities of PHP
PHP is a server-side programming language. Unlike Javascript, which runs on the client (browser), PHP runs entirely on the website’s server. Although its execution is slower than Javascript because of the time it takes for the request to reach the server and the response to get the browser, PHP has several advantages that we will summarize in the following points:
Confidential source code: Since PHP is a CGI language that runs on the server, its source code is never visible to the client, making it possible to manipulate confidential data.
Open source: PHP is a royalty-free programming language.
Multi-platform: PHP runs on application servers that can be installed on many operating systems (Unix/Linux, Windows, Mac OS, BSD, etc.)
Simple and intuitive syntax: People who have already programmed in C or Javascript find PHP easy to handle.
Simple database interfacing: Although PHP is often associated with the MySQL DBMS, it can interact with almost any known DBMS, especially with the help of the PDO interface.
Functional richness: PHP supports many libraries that allow you to perform different types of processing, such as DOM manipulation, network programming, or image processing.
Diversified execution modes: PHP can run in CGI mode, the most common, or CLI mode, which uses the command line like Shell scripts.
Available supports: PHP documentation is abundant and diversified, mainly thanks to the posts of the significant community formed around it. However, the official PHP support is available at www.php.net. If you want information about a function, type its name after the URL.
Diversified Frameworks: Many frameworks are available for developers who prefer these tools. Most of them support the MVC architecture, but the most famous are Zend Framework, Symfony, CodeIgniter, and Laravel.
Conclusion
We investigated the world of PHP so that you could understand how it functions and its fundamental features. We hope you enjoyed it and found some interesting information. Have good luck in writing your first code in PHP!
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