PHP

Making the Web Dynamic

The web becomes increasingly application-oriented. The way to achieve that dynamism is via a scripting language.

PHP has been the language of choice for an increasingly large number of organizations desiring to establish a successful interactive web presence, for which performance and maintainability are critical. Among those are Lufthansa, Boeing, SourceForge many government agencies, including Defense, GAO, and the National Weather Service. Other sites such as Yahoo, HotMail, Google and Amazon use PHP as an adjunct to their own proprietary web languages.

And, if you visit forums, it is highly likely the forum is implemented in PHP.

PHP is normally installed as a module within an Apache server. This means that it is part of the Apache process - all other technologies require external processes to be installed alongside the server and triggered whenever a page is visited.

The performance increase of being an integral part of Apache is significant.

Features

Syntactically, PHP is simpler than Perl and doesn't impose a huge artificial structure, as does Java.

Version 5 ups the 'object-oriented-ness' significantly. PHP has a much richer set of 'web-centric' functionality built in than most languages, as that is the environment for which it was born. Even more functionality is available via a standardized collection of extension packages called 'pear'

From the Command Line

An added benefit to PHP is it can be run from the command-line. This has application in two contexts:

  1. In the pure command-line context, it can be used as a general scripting language, with the advantages of cleaner, simpler syntax than perl, ability to run cross-platform, and access to the same rich functionality available in the web version (with the small exception of constructs that don't make sense outsite the web context.)
  2. In the web context, it allows you to pre-process sites. The advantage here is you can implement the site completely in PHP initially, to get the logic and functionality right and establish a presence. Then, you can seamlessly and incrementally pre-process greater parts of the site that don't change - for instance large, complex look-up structures, up to and including, static web-pages.

    All of this can be achieved using the same code and libraries the site uses - you don't have to create duplicate code in some other language to do it.

Purportedly, due to the fast performance, easy structuring, innate modularization ability, increased object-oriented features, and access to more GUI features, there are reports of organizations that have elected to undertake product development with PHP tied to a windowing system binding (gtk+ or Qt) over Java.

It's an interesting notion and underscores the frustrations people are having with Java. In this context, it's probably more akin to a cross-platform 'Visual Basic' - perhaps useful for small applications. For large, cross-platform apps, we still think a compiled language like C++ [or ObjC, in the Mac world] is a superior choice.)(Note - as usual, this is changing. See the C#/.NET page for more information.)

Regardless of it's extra-web capabilities, PHP is ideally suited for active content destined for the web.

More Information

php.net is the home of PHP, Zend Technologies is the recognized commercial arm that provides a comprehensive development, debugging, and profiling environment. There are also companies that provide PHP accelerators to improve performance even further.

Beyond that, there is a huge amount of support resources available on the web in various support and discussion forums.

KIS Systems has extensive experience in PHP and web technologies. We can help get your web application development moving.