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PHP is a programming language used on websites to provide functionality to that websites users. Rather than coding a website in html (hypertext markup language) which is normally a static type of website, PHP is used to be able to program how the html is generated dynamically (along with other features of using a programming language).
PHP comes free on all of our UK web hosting packages and is ready to use from the moment your web hosting account is setup.
This programming language has become rather common in the industry. There are other ways to programmatically build websites but this language has gained a big following among the people who build websites for others.
PHP is considered a scripting language and as such can be adopted by anyone who seeks to provide functionality to a website. It has a history of being developed by an individual as an alternative to another language that has been used a lot on webservers, Perl, which generally speaking had not been used for as broad a range of features for websites. A need was created and fulfilled by an individual and then his development effort that created PHP was turned over to an open source licensing approach so that others could work on the language and improve it in a collaborative manner. Therefore, by being licensed through open source protocols, it is essentially free to use and that has made it a very attractive language alternative for building websites.
When PHP was developed it stood for Personal Home Page. When the CGI (Common Gateway Interface) was being used as a standard way for webservers to deliver functionality, PHP was written in 1994 in the C programming language. There was a need for some broader ways to provide some functionality on the developers website that had previously been implemented in Perl scripts. These original Perl scripts were being used to operate the developers personal home page, hence the acronym. Basic processes were accomplished with the original website involving displaying a resume and keeping track of how many visitors came to his website. There was a forms capability known as a Forms Interpreter that had been written that was combined with his PHP capabilities to produce PHP/FI. Additional features were created including being able to access databases, a much needed capability to build web applications as the web was evolving, enabling simple and dynamic websites to be built. When it was released in 1995 PHP was at version 2 and had features like variables defined and managed similar to Perl, an ability to handle forms, and capability to embed HTML as well. Syntax of the original PHP was similar to Perl but had some differences, but was limited in functionality yet simpler and somewhat less consistent.
PHP has evolved to have more object oriented programming features in its current version, PHP 5. A data access layer using PHP Data Objects was implemented to map the objects to relational databases and provided a lightweight yet consistent interface.
There have also been a set of web application development frameworks built around PHP. These frameworks enable a rapid application development (RAD) process that uses a set of building blocks and a structure for the design of web applications.
Also a loose packaging of tools includes PHP called the LAMP architecture where the P is for PHP. The others are Linux as the operating system, Apache as the web server and MySQL as the database engine. Sometimes the P is substituted with Python or Perl if either better meets the need of the project.