PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP is a powerful and widely-used open source server-side scripting language to write dynamically generated web pages. PHP scripts are executed on the server and the result is sent to the browser as plain HTML.
PHP can be integrated with the number of popular databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and Microsoft SQL Server.
PHP can be embedded within a normal HTML web pages. That means inside your HTML documents you'll have PHP statements like this:
Example:
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<title>PHP Application</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php
// Display greeting message
echo 'Hello World!';
?>
</body>
</html>
What You Can Do with PHP
There are lot more things you can do with PHP.
- You can generate dynamic pages and files.
- You can create, open, read, write and close files on the server.
- You can collect data from a web form such as user information, email, credit card information and much more.
- You can send emails to the users of your website.
- You can send and receive cookies to track the visitor of your website.
- You can store, delete, and modify information in your database.
- You can restrict unauthorized access to your website.
- You can encrypt data for safe transmission over internet.
