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What is PHP?
Well according to php.net ......
PHP is a server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language. If you are completely new to PHP and want to get some idea of how it works, have a look at the introductory tutorial. Once you get beyond that, have a look at the example archive sites and some of the other resources available in the links section.
PHP is a project of the Apache Software Foundation.
So, How Much Does It Cost?
This may sound a little foreign to all you folks coming from a non-UNIX background, but PHP doesn't cost anything. You can use it for commercial and/or non-commercial use all you want. You can give it to your friends, print it out and hang it on your wall or eat it for lunch. Welcome to the world of Open Source software! Smile, be happy, the world is good. For the full legalese, see the official license.
And according to Zend ... (they rave on a little but you get the point)
What is PHP?
PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is an open-source server-side scripting language (freely downloadable from php.net and zend.com [and firepages :)]) for creating dynamic Web pages for e-commerce and other Web applications. A dynamic Web page is a page that interacts with the user, so that each user visiting the page sees customized information. Dynamic Web applications are prevalent in commercial (e-commerce) sites, where the content displayed is generated from information accessed in a database or other external source.
PHP offers a simple and universal solution for easy-to-program dynamic Web pages. The intuitive interface allows programmers to embed PHP commands right in the HTML page. PHP's syntax is similar to that of C and Perl, making it easy to learn for anyone with basic programming skills. Its elegant design makes PHP significantly easier to maintain and update than comparable scripts in other languages.
Because of its wide distribution to a large community of users, PHP is very well supported. As an open source product, PHP enjoys the support of a large group of open-source developers. The community gives excellent technical support to users, and bugs are found and repaired quickly. The code is continuously updated with improvements and language extensions to expand PHP's capabilities.
PHP has been in development since 1994. PHP 3, released in June 1998, has gained rapid popularity, and is now used in Web-related applications by some of the most prominent organizations such as Mitsubishi, Redhat, Der Spiegel, MP3-Lycos, Ericsson and NASA.
Unlike other scripting languages for Web page development, PHP offers excellent connectivity to most of the common databases (including Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, ODBC and many others). PHP also offers integration with various external libraries, which allow the developer to do anything from generating PDF documents to parsing XML. Perhaps the greatest advantage of PHP, when compared to other scripting languages such as ASP or ColdFusion, is that it is open-source and cross-platform, suitable for today's heterogeneous network environments.
PHP is the natural choice for developers on Linux machines running Apache server software, but runs equally well on any other UNIX or Windows platform, with Netscape or Microsoft Web server software. PHP also supports HTTP sessions, Java connectivity, regular expressions, LDAP, SNMP, IMAP, COM (under windows) protocols. It also supports WDDX complex data exchange between virtually all Web programming languages.
PHP offers excellent code performance. The combination PHP-Apache-Linux features sub-second access times, with even greater performance boosts achieved by caching data structures on the server.
PHP is today's fastest-growing technology for dynamic Web pages. According to the authoritative Netcraft survey of what technology is actually in use on the Web, PHP can now be found on more that 5 million domains, and is growing at a rate of up to 15% each month. PHP is available on over 36% of Apache Web servers – the most common server on the Web. The latest version of PHP, PHP 4, was downloaded 265,000 separate times in the first two months it was available. With the open-source trend gaining popularity, PHP is expected to continue to pick up momentum.
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