PHP

1. PHP By Brian Patterson & Amanda Perez

2. Who Made it? RasmusLerdorf PHP was originally created to maintain his personal homepage, hence the name PHP. Development began in 1994 and was released on June 8, 1995. In 1997, two Israeli developers, AndiGutmans and ZeevSuraski rewrote the parser which formed the base of PHP 3. The official launch of PHP 3 was in June 1998.

3. What is it? • What is PHP? • PHP is a general purpose server-side language designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. • PHP was originally an acronym for Personal Home Page but now stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. • PHP is open source. • PHP scripts are ran on the server. • PHP supports many databases (MySQL, Sybase, ODBC, etc). • PHP is free to download.

4. How PHP developed • RasmusLerdorf began PHP when he created a set of Perl scripts he called “Personal Home Page Tools” to maintain his personal homepage. • He first announced the release of PHP on the comp.infosystem.www.authoring.cgi Usenet discussion group on June 8, 1995. • ZeevSuraski and AndiGutmans rewrote the parser in 1997 which formed the base for PHP 3 with the official launch coming in June 1998. • They rewrote PHP’s core and produced the Zend Engine in 1999 and founded Zend Technologies.

5. How it works • PHP generally runs on a web server. • PHP acts as a filter, primarily, taking input from a file stream and/or PHP instructions and outputting the data, most commonly being HTML.

6. Readability PHP is considered to be one of the easiest languages to learn. Readability is quite easy as it is very similar to the language in which it was implemented in, C. All PHP begins with <?phpand ends with ?>. What’s in between is the php code itself so tracking it down is quite simple. The syntax of PHP is very similar to other C based languages.

7. Writability PHP was implemented in C so it takes much of its syntax from there. It is a weakly and dynamically typed language. It is easy to learn compared to many other languages and completely free.

8. Reliability PHP is an interpreted language making its build cycle super short. Its very portable with very little tweaking necessary between different operating systems. If the speed of a compiled program is needed, it can be compiled. For example, write what you need in C and use the C <-> PHP interface. One of the most widely used languages on the internet today.

9. Cost It’s FREE!! The cost to implement PHP is completely free. The PHP manual which is readily available at www.php.net is regarded as one of the best language manuals, making training very cost effective. The services needed for PHP can also be had for free, such as Apache server and MySql.

10. Pros and cons Pros Quick and easy. Works well with databases, file systems, etc. Huge amount of free support. One of the best online manuals. Shallow learning curve. Extremely large body of built in functions. Regular expression support. Extensive database support. Cons Global configuration patterns can change semantics affecting the portability. Too easy to learn. No decent ide for php. Too many choices for selecting libraries and framework. Backwards compatibility issues.

11. Code samples <?php echo "Hi, I'm a PHP script!"; ?> <?php # Script 1.9 - numbers.php //set the variables. $quantity = 30; $price = 119.95; $taxrate = .05; //calculate the total $total = $quantity * $price; $total = $total + ($total * $taxrate); $total = number_format ($total, 2); //Print the results. echo 'You are purchasing <b>' . $quantity . '</b> widget(s) at a cost of <b>$' . $price . '</b> each. With tax, the total comes to <b>$' . $total . '</b>; ?>

12. References PHP and MySQL for dynamic web sites 2nd Edition, Larry Ullman, 2005 http://mashable.com/2010/11/19/pros-cons-php/ http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PhpProsAndCons http://www.ehow.com/list_7238377_php-pros-cons.html http://www.php.net/manual/en/index.php http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP