PHP is the most popular web scripting language and a widely used programming language used for website development. PHP stands for “Hypertext Preprocessor” but it originally stood for “Personal Home Page” in 1995. It is a wonderful language which was originally designed for producing dynamic web pages for virtually any web application. PHP is a general purpose scripting language that facilitates developer in making dynamically driven websites and it is very easy to learn and understand.
PHP provides support to different databases like Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, etc and it can be easily embedded into HTML also. It rapidly grew to become much more robust language, but was originally designed for use in Web Site Development. In a nutshell, PHP is most popular because of its functionality which can be changed as per ones requirements.
In PHP community, PHP frameworks are the newest buzz word from recent years. There are different kinds of frameworks available and it is good for developers to select the right framework. The objective of a framework is make the web-based applications process easier. This helps in reusing the developed code, intuitive to work with and of course stable. Some of the important frameworks are Zend framework, Symfony, CakePHP, Prado and Solar. Among these, Zend framework is the most hyped framework and a web based application designed to build complex PHP applications simpler.
Benefits of PHP application development:
#1. PHP is an open-source language so it is free. It can be easily installed and you don’t need to pay thousands of dollars to purchase. It is used by millions of people and large group of developers around the globe.
#2. PHP integrates well with HTML which is its primary use i.e. the actual PHP code can be embedded into HTML code. This enables your web server to process web pages before they are actually displayed in the user’s web browser.
#3. PHP is generally human friendly (simple and easy to learn) than other high level programming languages such as C, C++, ASP or ASP.net.
#4. PHP is versatile which is supported on most web servers and runs on all major operating systems like Mac OS, windows, Linux etc.
#5. PHP results in quicker navigation and efficient page loading as its processing speed is quite faster.
#6. The most recent version of PHP is very stable. It is used for web programming much like C / JavaScript, Java and Microsoft C#.
PHP is a very well-established language. Its popularity continues to grow rapidly because it is free (it is open-source software), it is fast (It can be easily embedded into HTML), have full object oriented support and huge capability to build any sort of application which can run in web browser.
