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September 15, 2002
Plan It. Design It. Build It. Put Your Web Site To Work (cont'd)
PHP: New Kid on the Block
Even with the comparable ease of use of programs like FrontPage, Dreamweaver, and even Netscape Composer, a few among us still like the "dirty fingernails" feeling that comes from writing Web pages with raw HTML code. For us, there is a programming language that can be embedded directly into HTML, giving the page a wide range of new and potent interactive features.
In its first incarnation, PHP stood for Personal Home Page. However, it has grown into a powerful and sophisticated language that is now present on 20 percent of the world's Internet domains. PHP now stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor.
Born in Europe and wildly popular outside the United States for years, PHP has recently become the language of choice for developers of interactive Web sites, especially in the education community. PHP is similar to Perl, but easier to learn. It carries many of the features of Java, but since it is a preprocessor, only HTML is delivered to the surfer's computer. Consequently, it does not crash Web browsers the way the Java can.
PHP is used to
- process dates, times, and other dynamic information for display in Web pages;
- process inputs from Web forms, searching and manipulating text and performing arithmetic functions on values;
- carry form-entered information from page to page using variables;
- store form-inputted information into a database (most frequently MySQL), and retrieve information from a database to be displayed in dynamic Web pages.
PHP is a logical solution for education because it is
- already available on a large percentage of Web hosting services that can cost as little as $25 a month;
- compatible with the most popular online database, MySQL (which is also free);
- relatively easy to learn;
- ideal for providing access to database information;
- ideal for creating dynamic/updated Web pages;
- free.
You can learn more about PHP from the following Web sites
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