Selena:
PHP is a language that has outgrown its name. It was originally
conceived as a set of macros to help coders maintain persoanl home
pages, and thus it's former name from it's purpose,
"Personal Home Pages" initially. Since then, PHP's
capabilityhave been extended, taking beyond a set of utilities to a
full featured programming language, capable of managing huge
datbase-driven online enviroments.
As PHP's capabilities have grown, so too has it's popularity. PHP
is presently running at more than 1.4million hosts online. It is
also the most popular Apache server module available, beating even
ModPerl.
PHP is now officially know as PHP:Hypertext
Preprocessor It is a server-side scripting language
usually written in an HTML context. Unlike an ordinary HTML page, a
PHP script is not sent directly to a client by the server; instead,
it is parsed by rhe PHP binary or module on the host server itslef,
so no more downloading of plugins. HTML elemetns in the script are
left alone, but PHP code is interpreted and executed. PHP cpde on a
script can query databases, create images, read and write files,
talk to remote servers - the possibilities are endless. The output
from PHP cpde is combined with HTML in the script and the result
sent to the user. Often, PHP would be coupled with an SQL program
to harness it's pwoer with DBMs. The MySQL program is one of the
most popular, and with Apache server, MySQL DBM and PHP, the 3
makes a powerful combination.
Hope my little piece of summary is useful for you. If you want to
know more, you can go to www.php.net
[This message has been edited by Callan (edited 28 July 2000).]
