Advantages of PHP Programming

Rasmus Lerdorf wrote the first PHP - first called Personal Home Page - scripts as a series of Perl scripts that he used to track visitors to his webpage and to see who was viewing his resume. He eventually rewrote PHP as a scripting engine and added support for forms. Over the years the Personal Home Page acronym was dropped and it evolved into the PHP Hypertext. PHP can be used to create web applications ranging from personal websites to e-commerce applications and community web portals i.e. disucssion forums, blogs etc.

• Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS
• Programming PHP
• PHP and MySQL Web Development
• PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide
• The Joy of PHP
• PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites
• PHP Cookbook
• PHP & MySQL: The Missing Manual

The main advantages of PHP programming include the following:

Open Source

PHP is freely available for use. The community of open source PHP developers provides technical support and is constantly improving updating the core PHP functionalities. PHP is available at free of cost under PHP General Public License and most of its associative required software's like MySQL, Text Editors and Apache Server are also freely available, so it proves very cost effective for the developers.

Cross-Platform

PHP provides high compatibility with leading operating systems and web servers such as thereby enabling it to be easily deployed across several different platforms. PHP scripts can run across operating systems such as Linux, Windows, Solaris, OpenBSD, Mac OSX etc and also provide support for all major web servers such as Apache, IIS, iPlanet etc.

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Power

Several web tasks can now be easily perform using PHP. For example now we can develop from small websites to giant business and organizational websites, informative forums, chatting platforms, CRM solutions, e-commerce shopping carts, community websites, e-business, shopping carts and gigantic database driven sites.

User Friendly

Designed in a user friendly manner, PHP gives more flexibility than C, C++ and ASP and overall helps in increasing traffic to the site.

Quick

PHP is designed to work well with the web, and so things like accessing the GET and POST and working with HTML and URLs are built-ins in the PHP language. This makes it really concise and straightforward to make a website.

Extensions

Being an open source language, a large number of libraries and extensions, to extend its core functionalities, are available for download. The source code of PHP can be modified to include custom created extensions and components thereby increasing its extensibility.

Easy Deployment

There are many hosting companies that will, for a few dollars a month, give you a server running PHP so you can make a website really easily.

Automatically Refreshes

Nowadays developing dynamic websites are in the huge demand due to its specific characteristics like it automatically refreshes and does not need to make much changes manually.

Community Support

A huge advantage that PHP offers is its community. If you are looking for a particular script, chances are another user has already created something similar. Check within the PHP community for availability. Likewise, if you have created a function that others might enjoy, be sure to post the code for others.

Other Tools

If you need to access other web based tools like Google maps (which is always advisable for a business website), or any other, PHP makes it easy to access.

Security

PHP offers security as well that helps prevent malicious attacks. These security levels can be adjusted in the .ini file.

Talent Availability

You can hire PHP programmers more easily than any other language programmers since so many people know the language.

Summary

• Open Source, PHP is completely free.
• PHP can be easily embedded directly into HTML.
• Platform independent can run on Windows Linux or Mac servers.
• Run faster on the internet and easily integrate AJAX, Callback etc.
• Interfaces very easily with Apache/MySQL
• Lots of good books and on-line help.
• It's available with documentation in many languages.
• Easy to learn compared to many other scripting languages. It has a syntax that is easy to parse and is actually rather human-friendly.
• Lots of hosting services have it ready to use, no special configuration.
• Pretty easy to access other web-based tools through PHP i.e. google maps, etc.
• Lots of good source code out there to use and/or learn from, as well as many useful libraries for working with PDFs, graphics, etc.

In Closing

If you are ready to add dynamic content to your webpages, consider the use of PHP. It's free, easy to learn and integrates well across many platforms and with various software programs. There are tons of tutorials available on the net.It would be my pleasure to read your comments and please don't hesitate to add anything as you fully realize that I missed some other great PHP benefits. Feel free to share those with our readers.

PHP Programming