PHP - Programming the Web

PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page but now is considered PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. It was created in 1994 by a man named Rasmus Lerdorf. PHP has gone through four major revisions to bring us the advanced and matured version you see today. It's an open source product meaning you can have access to the source code and can alter and redistribute it without a charge.

PHP allows the users to do many things including: create shopping carts for e-commerce websites, allow a more interactive experience with interactive forms, create a customized user experience based on information that the user has gathered from them, as well as many other things.

A few strength's that PHP has over its competitors include its high performance, availability of source code, portability, low cost (if any), extensive library of common web tasks, allows interfacing of many different database systems and it's strong object-oriented support.

In order to use PHP a web developer must have a basic understanding and experience with HTML and programming knowledge. HTML which is the basic mark up language in creating a website go hand in hand with PHP. They work together to provide a more interactive web experience than just clicking on links. HTML is used to display information while PHP is used behind the scenes to do many things including handling forms and manipulating data.

PHP becomes an even better scripting language when it's coupled with a database. This allows the web developer to develop an interactive website that pulls and stores data which brings the websites to new levels.

PHP is utilized practically everyday in regards to our company Ender Technology. It's our bread to our butter. It's used in almost every instance of our experiences with web development. Whenever some sort of processing or interactivity is needed which is practically all the time we use PHP. It's allowed us to create some of our most advanced and creative websites to date many of which can be access through our site http://www.endertech.com/.

In order for us to build many websites that are showcased on our own site we needed a framework that allowed us full control of the PHP experience and at the same time achieve ease of maintenance and customization. For this purpose we've adopted the user of the Symfony framework. It's an MVC based framework that's built off and utilizes PHP.

Many can start programming in PHP by following any of the useful tutorials online or from a book. One site in particular that's widely used is w3schools.com (http://www.w3schools.com/php/default.asp). They go through a concise and easy to follow process of developing in PHP. Another main resource that developer use is the http://www.php.net/. It's PHP's main API resource and is invaluable to all PHP web developers.

Once the web developer becomes familiar with PHP they can then branch off into more complex development bound only by the developers creativity and knowledge.