PHP, which stands for Personal Home Page or PHP Hypertext
Preprocessor, is a specialized scripting language designed for creating dynamic
web content that is executed on the server side. It's also considered a
reflective programming language used to execute scripts on the server side,
although it can also be used with the command-line interface or through a
standalone graphical application. It has always been an alternative to
commercial programming languages like Java and others. Incredibly, PHP
originated in 1994 as a set of CGI binary files in the C programming language,
coded by Danish programmer Rasmus Ledorf to replace Perl scripts on his
personal webpage. Officially, PHP made its appearance on June 8, 1995.
Behind it today stand The PHP Development Team, Zend
Technologies, the PHP Foundation, and millions of users. It is estimated that
over 76% of websites on the Internet are powered by PHP in some way. By
default, PHP files end with the *.php extension. Sometimes, a portion of PHP
code is embedded directly into HTML pages; together with HTML, but best
practice is to separate PHP from HTML into a separate file. When the server
encounters a PHP header <?php and code in PHP; or a file that ends with
*.php; it automatically passes the entire file to the PHP processor. The result
is that your web browser will only display HTML, while all PHP code remains
hidden. If you take any HTML file and rename it to *.php, the HTML will be
executed as if you were using *.htm or *.html. If you're coding in PHP, always
use *.php files.
A web designer is ready to take a big step forward and learn PHP
The first version of
PHP was officially named
Personal Home Page Tools;
PHP Tools. It was simply the first use of the name
PHP. Consider that the creator of
PHP didn't initially intend for
PHP to become a programming language. In the second version,
Rasmus Ledorf claimed that
PHP was the simplest and fastest tool for creating dynamic web pages. The third version of
PHP completely changed the entire foundation from scratch. From all
4.x versions;
the Zend Engine was added; which added a more advanced
tag-parsing system - parse-execute, superglobals were introduced,
register_globals was disabled by default, and
CLI was introduced as an addition to
CGI. Only from
July 13, 2004, did the
PHP version bring significant improvements, of which
object-oriented programming support is definitely one. This opened up a whole new set of possibilities and a whole range of frameworks for
PHP emerged; which we would translate as work frameworks like
Laravel.
You see, the problem with
PHP is that it's too simple. You can easily try out your ideas and admire the quick successful results. The problem is when your project gets bigger and your team gets more people. In
PHP, you can do many things in multiple ways; what is simple for you can be completely complicated for others. Some things become obsolete, some are discarded, others change while each new phase becomes a nightmare. What is done in one day quickly turns into five days or you get completely stuck. For example, instead of the
PHP header
<?php, you type
<php? and the entire project, the Internet, time, and deadlines will turn upside down. And you simply have no idea what's wrong with the errors. In the
PHP programming language, there are so many mistakes; on some small details or logic that fixing errors can become a nightmare for every programmer.
And if you're entangled in classes, inheritance, interfaces, some project organization that only the first creator understands; documentation is useless then. That's why frameworks were created, and sometimes it's advisable to use them so that some things are organized for you. Again, if you're going to use
shared hosting; then stick with pure
PHP; because providers can disable
e.g., routing on their server and then
You're stuck or rent your own server, which will cost you three times as much. So, only experience saves you. And it's based on the mistakes you've gone through yourself; justified or not.
Preparing For the PHP Adventure: Setting Up Your PHP Programming Environment