PHP Programming - PHP, which stands for “Hypertext Preprocessor”, an open source, server-side, HTML embedded scripting language used to create dynamic Web pages. Much of its syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with some unique features thrown in. The goal of the language is to allow web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly. PHP-enabled web pages are treated just like regular HTML pages and you can create and edit them the same way you normally create regular HTML pages. PHP hypertext preprocessor is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development.

More about it, PHP is a script language and interpreter that is freely available from php.net and is used primarily on UNIX Web servers. PHP offers excellent connectivity to many databases including MySQL, Informix, Oracle, Sybase, Solid, PostgreSQL, and Generic ODBC. The popular PHP-MySQL combination (both are open-source products) is available on almost every UNIX host. It is an alternative to Microsoft's Active Server Page (ASP)

About PHP Scripts

ASP stands for Active Server Pages. It is a program that runs inside IIS (Internet Information Services). IIS comes as a free component with Windows 2000 and it is also a part of the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack. We can download Option Pack from Microsoft. PWS (Personal Web Server) is a smaller - but fully functional - version of IIS, can be found on your Windows 95/98 CD

What is an ASP Files ?
 

We can write PHP scripts using any either a text editor, like Notepad, or HTML editors such as Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver. There are also many freeware programs specifically designed for writing PHP code.

Once you've finished programming your PHP code, save the file with a .php extension. PHP is a server-side scripting language and runs on your Web server, not on the user's browser, so you do not need to worry about compatibility issues. You then upload the file via FTP to the Web server.

In short, PHP is a server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language that lets you create dynamic web pages. In this age of rapid application development and dynamic Web sites, the ability to code and deploy powerful applications quickly is in high demand. With strong development community support and an ever-expanding class library, PHP has become the default development platform for many projects.

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