This section describes what is PHP language and what are main features supported in PHP.
What Is PHP? PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, a recursive acronym. It is mainly a Web server side scripting language.
But it can also be used for other purposes.
PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995 as a simple Web page generation tool named as
PHP/FI (Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter). Today it becomes the number one of server side scripting languages.
Here is a comparison of number of matches on Google for key words: "PHP script", "Perl script", and "ASP script":
Key words Number of matches
PHP script 13,600,000
Perl script 11,900,000
ASP script 8,650,000
Main features of PHP:
Cookies - PHP transparently supports HTTP cookies.
Sessions - PHP supports sessions to allow you to preserve certain data across subsequent accesses.
Connection handling - PHP maintains a connection in 3 possible states: NORMAL, ABORTED, and TIMEOUT.
Using remote files - PHP allows you to open remote files with Internet protocols like HTTP or FTP.
