Why should I create my web application using PHP?

Technologies · 17 Aug 2007

There are lots of scripting languages available which could be used for developing web applications. One of them is PHP. PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor. It is free, open source, server side scripting language used by more than 17 million websites. As it is very easy to learn while being rich with features required by web applications, it is the best language you can use to develop your web application.

PHP is very easy to learn. You can start learning PHP by visiting http://www.php.net. Its syntax is similar to C, C++ or Javascript. To help you further, there are lots of tutorials available online which will help you in getting started. Official website of PHP provides good documentation of PHP tags and user manual that you could use to get more in depth knowledge. Also, there are lots of open source scripts like WordPress and Drupal that you can use directly to create your websites. While being easy to learn and use, PHP has lot of integrated features.

PHP is a complete programming language and offers powerful access to database management systems like MySQL and PostgreSQL. This makes it a good choice for developing web applications having database backend. Starting from version 5, PHP has strong Object Oriented support. This allows you to create more complex web application while writing good and maintainable code. Using integrated development environments like Eclipse will help you to write your code faster.

PHP script can be embedded directly into HTML. However, the name of the page must end with “.php” and not “.htm” or “.html”. Web server (Apache) interprets PHP code embedded in HTML and executes it. However, you can totally separate PHP code from HTML using template engines like Smarty. This allows you to separate presentation part from the logic. This is very important as you can edit the template of your web application which is created using HTML without touching or understanding PHP code.

PHP is normally used along with other open source tools like Apache and MySQL. This combination, commonly known as LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) is unbeatable. PHP allows you to create dynamic web pages and interactive websites. It’s an open source scripting language which unlike JavaScript, runs on server. It helps you in developing web applications without worrying about platform as it is platform independent. It is best for creating web applications. This makes PHP a good choice for developing web applications.