From what you hear being said about it you could be forgiven for thinking it to
be the panacea for all that ails the Web development world. There are those who
would argue that you would be right in thinking that. While I may not quite go
to that extreme, I will join those who will not argue against the notion! It is
indeed a very useful weapon in the Web Designer's arsenal. So what exactly is
it? Where can you get it? How much does it cost? How do you use it? Whoa there,
Nelly! That's what this little series is all about. This is an introduction to
PHP intended to give you a foundation for its use and to guide to resources you
can use to get deeper into the PHP world. PHP is gaining ground quite rapidly
and is being accepted and used in some very demanding and traditionally cautious
environments. There are good reasons, so you are encouraged to read on!
PHP started its life in 1994 in the mind and hands of one Mr. Rasmus Lerdorf. Recognizing the virtue of his creation a number of very talented programmers have lent their skills to its development, and have included a number of complete rewrites along the way. The latest release, PHP4 comes from a company called Zend. PHP is an Open Source project, meaning that its source code is available for you to study, use and modify, should you so wish. Its name originally stood for Personal Home Page, but it has since adopted "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor" (GNU, the open source project is fond of recursive names like its own "GNU's Not Unix".) PHP is free. It can be downloaded from www.PHP.net or, for PHP4, www.Zend.com.
PHP is a Server Side scripting language. Compare that to JavaScript, which is a client side scripting language. The main difference between Server Side and Client Side concerns what data you can manipulate and when. If you want to manipulate data that is in databases on the server, then you need to use server-side technology. The web pages themselves also reside on the server, and so are also manipulated by server side technology. Once the page has been displayed on the client machine you need client side technology to manipulate data associated with it. For example, if you have displayed a form on which your site visitor is entering data and you wish to validate that data, allowing the visitor to make corrections, before sending the data back to the server, then all that validation must be performed by client side technology.
PHP started its life in 1994 in the mind and hands of one Mr. Rasmus Lerdorf. Recognizing the virtue of his creation a number of very talented programmers have lent their skills to its development, and have included a number of complete rewrites along the way. The latest release, PHP4 comes from a company called Zend. PHP is an Open Source project, meaning that its source code is available for you to study, use and modify, should you so wish. Its name originally stood for Personal Home Page, but it has since adopted "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor" (GNU, the open source project is fond of recursive names like its own "GNU's Not Unix".) PHP is free. It can be downloaded from www.PHP.net or, for PHP4, www.Zend.com.
PHP is a Server Side scripting language. Compare that to JavaScript, which is a client side scripting language. The main difference between Server Side and Client Side concerns what data you can manipulate and when. If you want to manipulate data that is in databases on the server, then you need to use server-side technology. The web pages themselves also reside on the server, and so are also manipulated by server side technology. Once the page has been displayed on the client machine you need client side technology to manipulate data associated with it. For example, if you have displayed a form on which your site visitor is entering data and you wish to validate that data, allowing the visitor to make corrections, before sending the data back to the server, then all that validation must be performed by client side technology.
