The server-side script language - PHP

PHP (Hypertext Preprocesser) originally known as "Personal Home Page" is a scripting language used to create dynamic web pages. It is with the syntax from C, Java and Perl, and a widely used coding language which could be embedded within HTML pages. But the differecne is that HTML is a clinet-side markup language, while PHP has to be executed in the server side and interpreted by the PHP engine which could be installed in the same web server like Apache or another PHP server separatedly from the web server.

PHP is used for e-commerce, blogs, web based e-mail services, content management systems and personal and business websites. The most common use of PHP is to extract data out of a database such as MySQL and present it on the web pages.

In recent years, there is a quite fashionable word "AMP" which is short for Apache, MySQL and PHP. It is regarded as a golden combination by plenty of programmers. They are all open-source, cheap, easy to get and fast in problem-resolving because there are always a large number of programme engineers and fans putting their great enthusiasm into AMP. As a result, a lot of middle-sized enterprises, even some large companies, they lean to develop their information systems by adopting AMP. That is some reasons towards why PHP has been getting an mature development since it was created.

PHP facilities HTML to produce a dynamic and interactive web page with uses, however, it is not so convenient as HTML. Because it must be interpreted by a server-side PHP engine and the loading speed might be slower than only using HTML. Besides, for the programmer, it is not as much easy as HTML if they would like to test their PHP codes on the computer. As we known, HTML could be parsed directly by web browsers; yet, they have to install an PHP engine to simulate a server-side environment if they wish to do some test.