The initials PHP identifies a programming language that was born as Personal Home Page (PHP) Tools . It was developed by the programmer of Danish origin Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 with the purpose of facilitating the design of dynamic web pages.
The recursive acronym, however, is currently linked to PHP Hypertext Pre-Processor . He language is developed today by The PHP Group although it lacks formal regulations. The Free Software Foundation therefore, consider the PHP license as part of the software free.
The PHP language is usually processed directly in the server although it can also be used through software capable of executing commands and for the development of another kind of programs .
Lerdorf designed the first version of PHP in language Perl based on writing a set of CGI of the C language . His intention was to present his curriculum vitae and store data such as the number of visitors who accessed his Web page .
The programmers of Israeli origin Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans , for their part, were responsible for rewriting the parser in 1997 and threw the PHP3 , replacing the name of the language with the most recent. Over time, these programmers would rewrite the entire code PHP
Currently PHP is usually embedded within the HTML code of web pages and run from a server. It is estimated that PHP is present in more than twenty million websites and in about one million servers.
One of the advantages of PHP is its resemblance to structured programming languages (such as Perl and C), which helps programmers to develop complex applications in a short time. In fact, for a programmer with little experience in this language, it is very easy to learn and move to its pages functions and structures that are often used in the creation of other kinds of software.
While there are alternatives for all tastes, many consider PHP as an indispensable tool when developing a website. In principle, it allows to establish a connection with the database, through which it is possible, for example, to present on-screen personal data of the client when it requires it. But the characteristic most important of PHP is that it allows dynamically modify the content of a page, which is essential today.
For example, in an online newspaper, news is uploaded very frequently, and the "front page" changes several times throughout a day. It would be very laborious to have to alter the html code every time you want to update the page, since it would not only be necessary to add the most recent article, but to place it in the first place and move the rest down, eventually eliminating some so as not to overload the page. If we add to this the rules of each design, which usually indicate a different image size for the cover and another for the full text, links that appear only in the preview (such as "related posts"), etc., said homework could be impracticable.
Thanks to the possibilities that PHP offers, just by updating the base of data With the latest news, a well-designed site will be able to dynamically arrange all the information every time someone loads the cover. Of course, its advantages do not end there, and if used in conjunction with other languages, such as Javascript, and development models such as Ajax, the results can be dazzling.
Simply put, Javascript runs on the user's computer, so it offers complementary possibilities to PHP's, so that together they can perform tasks such as automatically adjusting the proportions of a page according to local resolution, changing the content without refreshing and reloading, as well as uploading files to the server offering real-time information on the upload progress.
