What is PHP Hypertext Preprocessor Scripting Language?

What is PHP Hypertext Preprocessor Scripting Language?

PHP refers to PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP is a widely-used open source general-purpose computer scripting language created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, and is especially suited for Internet development and can be embedded into HTML.

You can create dynamic web pages with the PHP scripting language. You can embed PHP commands within a standard HTML page. PHP's syntax is similar to that of C and Perl, making it easy to learn for anyone with basic programming skills.

A dynamic PHP Web page interacts with the user, so that each user visiting the page sees customized information. PHP can also be used to create dynamic web pages that are generated from information accessed from a MySQL database.

PHP offers connectivity to most of the common databases, although currently only MySQL is supported on the central webservers. PHP has hundreds of base functions and thousands more from extensions. PHP offers integration with various external libraries, which allow the developer to do anything from generating PDF documents to parsing XML.

As of April 2007, over 20,000,000 Internet websites were hosted on web servers with PHP scripting language installed.