What is PHP & how does it work?

PHP is a general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to server-side web development, in which case PHP generally runs on a web server. Any PHP code in a requested file is executed by the PHP runtime, usually to create dynamic web page content or dynamic images used on websites or elsewhere.

Is PHP a standard?

PHP has been widely ported and can be deployed on most web servers on a variety of operating systems and platforms. The PHP language evolved without a written formal specification or standard until 2014, with the original implementation acting as the de facto standard that other implementations aimed to follow.

When was PHP developed?

PHP development began in 1993 when Rasmus Lerdorf wrote several Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs in C, which he used to maintain his personal homepage. He extended them to work with web forms and to communicate with databases, and called this implementation "Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter" or PHP/FI.

Is PHP a server-side scripting language?

Originally designed to create dynamic web pages, PHP now focuses mainly on server-side scripting, and it is similar to other server-side scripting languages that provide dynamic content from a web server to a client, such as Microsoft 's ASP.NET, Sun Microsystems ' JavaServer Pages, and mod_perl.