SmartWebby's Introduction to PHP
PHP has become a more popular technology for web programming in the recent years due to its open source technology. This means that it is free to use and is compatible with almost any server, say Windows, Linux/Unix and Apache servers. Though it is an open source technology, it has many advanced features included in it and is now capable of handling almost any issue related to the internet. PHP stands for "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor". PHP is a server-side scripting language. This means that a PHP page is processed on a Web server by a PHP script engine. When the client makes a request for any page, the request is sent to the server, the server locates the requested page and executes the PHP code if any and the result is sent to the browser (client) in the form of HTML. The browser then compiles the HTML to display the output.