PHP is a scripting language designed to fill the gap between SSI (Server Side Includes) and Perl, intended largely for the web environment. PHP has gained quite a following in recent times, and it is one of the forerunners in the Open Source software movement. Its popularity derives from its C-like syntax, its speed and its simplicity. PHP is currently divided into two major versions: PHP 4 and PHP 5, although PHP 4 is deprecated and is no longer developed or supplied with critical bug fixes. PHP 6 is currently under development. If you've ever been to a website that needs you to login, you've probably encountered a server-side scripting language. Due to its market saturation, this means you've probably come across PHP.
Basically, PHP allows a static web document to become dynamic. "PHP" is a recursive acronym that stands for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor". PHP preprocesses (that is, PHP processes before the output is sent to the browser) hypertext documents. Because of this, the pages can change before the user sees them, based on conditions. This can be used to write something to the page, create a table with a number of rows equal to the number of times the user has visited, or integrate the web page with a web database, such as MySQL.
Before you embark on the wonderful journey of Server Side Processing, it is recommended that you have some basic understanding of the HyperText Markup Language. PHP is also being used to build GUI-driven applications; PHP-GTK is used to build Graphical User Interfaces.
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