maeby a stupid question but question

[hemuz]

may some one tell me what PHP exactly means?

[krakjoe]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP

[Fried]

PHP is a scripting language, like HTML (but HTML is not a scripting language anyway).

PHP is a website coding language that allows you to create databases, files, make your page look like something.php?something=something, etc....

[krakjoe]

HTML pages are static material served by every webserver in the world, but HTML has no way to interact with the user or server, so the page you write is the page that gets displayed, exactly as you wrote it.

PHP brings so much more to the web than HTML, like Javascript, it makes pages "Dynamic" meaning every user can get an entirely different page, or just different text / images.

PHP is a server side language, meaning, all the processing of the scripts are done by the server, and then sent to the users browser, as opposed to a client side language, like Javascript that executes on the host machine, the server has no part in it, and so doesn't know the result.

The best thing about php is the it can be embedded in normal HTML pages, just by changing the extension from .htm or .html to .php ( sometimes .php5 or .php4 ) for example, if you had a page named index.html with

<table>
<tr>
<td>
Hi user today is the 30 september 2006
</td>
</tr>
</table>

every user would see

Hi user today is the 30 september 2006

but, if you had a page named index.php with

<table>
<tr>
<td>
Hi <? echo $user; ?> today is: <? echo date('D M Y'); ?>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

you would get todays date every time the page was loaded......and if somewhere in the script the variable $user was set, it would greet them by name ....

[Decker]

Exactly - well no, it's developed over years and the pre processed hypertext processor language was even developed using CGI/PERL as the processor. As far as I know!!

[Fried]

Yeah...
PHP WAS built using a perl processor. Thats why these days all cpanel hosting have perl as well as PHP.

But HTML and PHP are 2 completely different things, like krak_joe said.

HTML is a markup language, which is translated by the browser.

PHP is a scripting language, which is translated by the server.

[krakjoe]

used to be called the home page language or something similar, one guy wrote it for his own website in the first place, and you can still use php as a cgi binary, IIS has to run it this way.

[Decker]

According to php.net - KRAK_JOE almost got it - good work from memory :)

History of PHP
PHP/FI

PHP succeeds an older product, named PHP/FI. PHP/FI was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, initially as a simple set of Perl scripts for tracking accesses to his online resume. He named this set of scripts 'Personal Home Page Tools'. As more functionality was required, Rasmus wrote a much larger C implementation, which was able to communicate with databases, and enabled users to develop simple dynamic Web applications. Rasmus chose to release the source code for PHP/FI for everybody to see, so that anybody can use it, as well as fix bugs in it and improve the code.

PHP/FI, which stood for Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter, included some of the basic functionality of PHP as we know it today. It had Perl-like variables, automatic interpretation of form variables and HTML embedded syntax. The syntax itself was similar to that of Perl, albeit much more limited, simple, and somewhat inconsistent.

By 1997, PHP/FI 2.0, the second write-up of the C implementation, had a cult of several thousand users around the world (estimated), with approximately 50,000 domains reporting as having it installed, accounting for about 1% of the domains on the Internet. While there were several people contributing bits of code to this project, it was still at large a one-man project.

PHP/FI 2.0 was officially released only in November 1997, after spending most of its life in beta releases. It was shortly afterwards succeeded by the first alphas of PHP 3.0.

[hemuz]

thank you for completly answer

[krakjoe]

According to php.net - KRAK_JOE almost got it - good work from memory :)

Yeah, that's it .... home page tools .....