How does PHP help a web developer?- Dynamic Web Sites with PHP
PHP and Dynamism? Open Sourcce PHP Scripting by PHP Web Developer

Another scripting language? Why? Well, PHP (PHP: Hypertext Processor) currently running over a million web sites speaks for itself, and quite eloquently at that. Mitsubishi Motors, Red Hat and VBWorld.net and a number of other sites use the language.

Dynamic Web Sites with PHP?
An open source server-side HTML-embedded scripting language. The first version of PHP or 'Personal Home Pages' that was written by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 has come a long way since then. Israeli developers Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans developed the PHP 3 version in 1997 and made it the full-fledged scripting language that it is today.

It runs equally well on Unix and NT and is well documented and capable enough to build complex and dynamic web sites that can run on either platform. Today, it competes with other web scripting tools with the added features of integrating seamlessly with multiple platforms and servers.

What was the need for creating PHP? For one thing it was aimed at being an alternative web development tool - a server-side scripting tool that is ideal for developing web-based sites and applications and was embedded within HTML. In a nutshell, this resulted in quicker response times, improved security and transparency to the end user. It is maintained by a set of developers and a large group of contributors.

What does all this mean? Are we just adding on to a list of scripting languages? To fully understand the language lets talk about open source and dynamic web pages. To quote the Open Source organization - "The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, and people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seem Astonishing".

HTML tags are descriptive and create static web pages. To bring in some user interactivity the need for dynamism on a web page is paramount. To handle variability we need a command language that can handle user inputs and react to them. PHP is one such language. It helps create a dynamic page that interacts with the user and displays information customized to the user.

Languages like ASP and JSP (Active Server Pages and Java Server Pages) were created for the same purpose. We shall compare these languages in a moment. But, first let's talk about PHP as an entity and then trace out its core features.

As we just said, PHP is a server-side scripting language that is ideal for Dynamic Web Sites with PHP and applications.

People who work with PHP praise it for its "easy to work with and easy to pick up" functionality, speed of execution and its ability to reuse code. Being an open source tool it can speed development time and allow the creation of robust and secure applications. Possessing an elegant and simple syntax borrowed from C, Perl, C++ and Java, it also possesses built-in variables that enable access to a CGI environment and form/cookie data. It's cross-platform features offer excellent connectivity to common databases including Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, ODBC and others. Added facilities of integrating with various external libraries enable developers to generate PDF documents and even parse XML.

PHP version 3.0.0 evolved to PHP 4 and Zend - a super version that supports PDF, XML, Oracle, ODBC, Win32 COM and so on. Zend is the engine included in PHP that contains a series of components, one of which is a language parser - the Zend engine. The Zend Optimizer, Zend Cache and Compiler are the others.