Beginner's Guide What is PHP Language_PHP Tutorial

After a long period of development of the PHP language, many users know the PHP language very well. Here I will express my personal understanding and discuss it with you. Friends who pay more attention to the Internet, especially those who pay attention to website construction technology, may have heard of PHP. PHP is a simple yet powerful programming language designed for dynamically creating HTML content.

PHP itself is a simple yet powerful language. The PHP language has core features such as powerful string and array processing capabilities, and has greatly improved support for object-oriented programming (PHP5 and above). By using standard and optional extension modules, PHP applications can connect to more than a dozen databases such as MySQL or Oracle, draw, create PDF files, and create and parse XML files. You can also use C language to write your own PHP extension module. For example, provide a PHP interface function in an existing code base. You can also run PHP under Windows, use COM to control other Windows applications such as Word and Excel, or use ODBC to connect to a database.

In China, PHP once kept pace with Microsoft's ASP and was a commonly used network programming language. ASP3.0 has been abandoned by Microsoft and will no longer be updated. Some people may think that PHP is also going to be dead soon, right?

However, the fact is exactly the opposite. PHP is not only developing rapidly, leaving ASP far behind, but also gradually becoming the most widely used and popular language on the Internet.

According to a survey by the Netcraft website (http://www.netcraft.com), there are now more than 23 million website servers using PHP in the world (accounting for more than a quarter of global websites. The number of global websites includes all static There are about 100 million websites). Judging from Netcraft's data, PHP has developed rapidly this year and has a strong upward momentum. According to TIOBE's ranking of the world's most popular programming languages ​​(http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm), PHP ranks firmly in the top five.

According to data provided by Note 1 of "Programming PHP", the number of program developers using PHP worldwide has reached 2.5 million. The development team of the PHP language itself is also very large, with currently more than 450 developers, who have submitted more than 1 million lines of code through CVS. The PHP community is the most active development community in the world, where tens of millions of people share code, promote the PHP language, help each other, and build many well-known projects. In fact, the

"LAMP" (Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP) technology combination in the world is already the most popular WEB technology combination today. Since these softwares are free, anyone using LAMP can set up a personal or commercial site of their own for absolutely free. Moreover, these software are all open source, you can easily download the code written by others and install it on your own website.

Of course, PHP can not only run on Linux. In fact, PHP supports all current mainstream operating systems, such as Windows, various Unix systems, etc. Most Chinese netizens use Windows operating systems, and even the server market is dominated by Windows systems (which is rare in the world). PHP can also run well with IIS servers on Windows operating systems. Recently, Microsoft also signed an agreement with Zend to increase support for PHP in Windows Server 2003 and its future version Longhorn.

Simplicity is what makes PHP so successful. Simplicity equals less code and shorter development cycles. Developers and companies can often use PHP to complete projects in a short time that may take many times the time with other languages.

As Google’s Adam Bosworth said:

“There is an unacknowledged war happening every day in the world of programming. It is between ordinary people and computer scientists It's a war between people who want to write code in a simple, flexible, user-friendly way and people who want to write code in a clean, clear, and correct way. It's between PHP and C++/Java. "

The future of PHP is very bright, and major platform vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, MySQL, Intel and RedHat all recognize and support PHP. Zend has joined forces with several leading companies and members of the PHP community to launch a new collaboration project, the Collaboration Project, which aims to take PHP to a new level by creating an enterprise-class, standardized web application development framework and development environment. . The main content of this project is Zend PHP Framework and Eclipse PHP IDE.

Although there is currently a huge gap in PHP penetration between China and developed European and American countries, with the new round of Internet boom and the popularization of open source culture, PHP will develop rapidly in China. We believe that more people will understand open source and PHP, and PHP will play a more important role in China's Internet construction.