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Introduction: PHP is supported on all BottomLine Hosting plans. A very popular
language that is relatively easy to learn/use and at the same time versatile
& powerful. Presented below is an overview of what PHP is and what it can do.
Learn more about PHP at PHP.net, and from numerous free resources on the
internet.
PHP (recursive acronym for "PHP: Hypertext
Preprocessor") is a widely-used Open Source general-purpose scripting language
that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.
Simple answer, but what does that mean? An example:
Example 1-1. An introductory example
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<html>
<head>
<title>Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php
echo
"Hi, I'm a PHP script!";
?>
</body>
</html>
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Notice how this is different from a script written in other languages like
Perl or C -- instead of writing a program with lots of commands to output HTML,
you write an HTML script with some embedded PHP code to do something (in this
case, output some text). The PHP code is enclosed in special start and
end that allow you to jump into and out of "PHP mode".
What distinguishes PHP hosting from something like client-side JavaScript is
that the code is executed on the server. If you were to have a script similar to
the above on your server, the client would receive the results of running that
script, with no way of determining what the underlying code may be. You can even
configure your web server to process all your HTML files with PHP, and then
there's really no way that users can tell what you have up your sleeve.
The best things in using PHP & PHP hosting is that it is extremely simple for
a newcomer, but offers many advanced features for a professional programmer.
Don't be afraid reading the long list of PHP's features. You can jump in, in a
short time, and start writing simple scripts in a few hours.
Although PHP's development is focused on server-side scripting, you can do
much more with it. Read on:
Anything. PHP is mainly focused on server-side scripting, so you can do
anything any other CGI program can do, such as collect form data, generate
dynamic page content, or send and receive cookies. But PHP can do much more.
There are three main areas where PHP scripts are used.
- Server-side scripting. This is the most traditional and main target
field for PHP. You need three things to make this work. The PHP parser (CGI
or server module), a PHP hosting server and a web browser. You need to run
the PHP webserver, with a connected PHP installation. You can access the PHP
program output with a web browser, viewing the PHP page through the server.
All these can run on your home machine if you are just experimenting with
PHP programming.
- Command line scripting. You can make a PHP script to run it without any
server or browser. You only need the PHP parser to use it this way. This
type of usage is ideal for scripts regularly executed using cron (on *nix or
Linux) or Task Scheduler (on Windows). These scripts can also be used for
simple text processing tasks.
- Writing desktop applications. PHP is probably not the very best language
to create a desktop application with a graphical user interface, but if you
know PHP very well, and would like to use some advanced PHP features in your
client-side applications you can also use PHP-GTK to write such programs.
You also have the ability to write cross-platform applications this way.
PHP-GTK is an extension to PHP, not available in the main distribution.
PHP can be used on all major operating systems, including Linux, many Unix
variants (including HP-UX, Solaris and OpenBSD), Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X,
RISC OS, and probably others. PHP hosting also has support for most of the web
servers today. This includes Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server,
Personal Web Server, Netscape and iPlanet servers, Oreilly Website Pro server,
Caudium, Xitami, OmniHTTPd, and many others. For the majority of the servers PHP
has a module, for the others supporting the CGI standard, PHP can work as a CGI
processor.
So with PHP hosting , you have the freedom of choosing an operating system
and a web server. Furthermore, you also have the choice of using procedural
programming or object oriented programming, or a mixture of them. Although not
every standard OOP feature is implemented in PHP 4, many code libraries and
large applications (including the PEAR library) are written only using OOP code.
PHP 5 fixes the OOP related weaknesses of PHP 4, and introduces a complete
object model.
With PHP hosting you are not limited to output HTML. PHP's abilities includes
outputting images, PDF files and even Flash movies (using libswf and Ming)
generated on the fly. You can also output easily any text, such as XHTML and any
other XML file. PHP can autogenerate these files, and save them in the file
system, instead of printing it out, forming a server-side cache for your dynamic
content.
One of the strongest and most significant features in PHP is its support for
a wide range of databases. Writing a database-enabled web page is incredibly
simple. The following databases are currently supported:
| Adabas D |
InterBase |
PostgreSQL |
| dBase |
FrontBase |
SQLite |
| Empress |
mSQL |
Solid |
| FilePro (read-only) |
Direct MS-SQL |
Sybase |
| Hyperwave |
MySQL |
Velocis |
| IBM DB2 |
ODBC |
Unix dbm |
| Informix |
Oracle (OCI7 and OCI8) |
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| Ingres |
Ovrimos |
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We also have a DBX database abstraction extension allowing you to transparently
use any database supported by that extension. Additionally PHP supports ODBC,
the Open Database Connection standard, so you can connect to any other database
supporting this world standard.
PHP hosting also has support for talking to other services using protocols
such as LDAP, IMAP, SNMP, NNTP, POP3, HTTP, COM (on Windows) and countless
others. You can also open raw network sockets and interact using any other
protocol. PHP has support for the WDDX complex data exchange between virtually
all Web programming languages. Talking about interconnection, PHP has support
for instantiation of Java objects and using them transparently as PHP objects.
You can also use our CORBA extension to access remote objects.
PHP has extremely useful text processing features, from the POSIX Extended or
Perl regular expressions to parsing XML documents. For parsing and accessing XML
documents, PHP 4 supports the SAX and DOM standards, and you can also use the
XSLT extension to transform XML documents. PHP 5 standardizes all the XML
extensions on the solid base of libxml2 and extends the feature set adding
SimpleXML and XMLReader support.
While using PHP web hosting in the e-commerce field, you'll find the
Cybercash payment, CyberMUT, VeriSign Payflow Pro and MCVE functions useful for
your online payment programs.
At last but not least, we have many other interesting extensions, the
mnoGoSearch search engine functions, the IRC Gateway functions, many compression
utilities (gzip, bz2), calendar conversion, translation...
As you can see this page is not enough to list all the features and benefits
PHP can offer. |
