PHP SCRIPTING FOR WEB PAGES

PHP Scripting Language

PHP is a server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language that lets you create dynamic web pages. 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 is mainly focused on server-side scripting, so you can do anything any other CGI program can do, such as collect form data, generate dynamic page content, or send and receive cookies. PHP is the programming language used with the MySQL programming language to create the osCommerce shopping cart engine that is the underlying basis for our free AeroCART shopping cart (see PHP shopping cart demo here)

There are three main areas where PHP scripts are used.

Server-side scripting: This is the most traditional and main target field for PHP. You need three things to make this work. You can access the PHP program output with a web browser, viewing the PHP page through the server. All these can run on your home machine if you are just experimenting with PHP programming.

Command line scripting: You can make a PHP script to run it without any server or browser. You only need the PHP parser to use it this way. This type of usage is ideal for scripts regularly executed using cron (on *nix or Linux) or Task Scheduler (on Windows). These scripts can also be used for simple text processing tasks.

Writing desktop applications: PHP is probably not the very best language to create a desktop application with a graphical user interface, but if you know PHP very well, and would like to use some advanced PHP features in your client-side applications you can also use PHP-GTK to write such programs. You also have the ability to write cross-platform applications this way. 

For the majority of the servers PHP has a module, for the others supporting the CGI standard, PHP can work as a CGI processor - with PHP, you have the freedom of choosing an operating system and a web server. You also have the choice of using procedural programming or object oriented programming, or a mixture of them.

Although not every standard OOP feature is implemented in PHP 4, many code libraries and large applications (including the PEAR library) are written only using OOP code. With PHP you are not limited to output HTML. PHP's abilities includes outputting images, PDF files and even Flash movies (using libswf and Ming) generated on the fly.

 You can also output easily any text, such as XHTML and any other XML file. PHP can autogenerate these files, and save them in the file system, instead of printing it out, forming a server-side cache for your dynamic content. 

One of the strongest and most significant features in PHP is its support for a wide range of databases. Writing a database-enabled web page is incredibly simple. PHP has extremely useful text processing features, from the POSIX Extended or Perl regular expressions to parsing XML documents. 

 While using PHP in the e-commerce field, you'll find the Cybercash payment, CyberMUT, VeriSign Payflow Pro and MCVE functions useful for your online payment programs. 

There are also other interesting extensions, the mnoGoSearch search engine functions, the IRC Gateway functions, many compression utilities (gzip, bz2), calendar conversion, translation, etc.