Modern age developers need to have thorough understanding about some PHP factors. They are crucial to develop a well designed PHP based website or application. Prior to knowing or starting with anything, a PHP developer should have basic knowledge of the following:
- HTML
- CSS
- Javascript
What is PHP?
PHP is an acronym for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”. It is a widely-used, open source scripting language. Furthermore, its scripts are executed on the serve. Also, PHP is free to download and use!
Fact about PHP
PHP is an amazing and popular language!
Well, one of the crucial PHP factors to understand is that it is powerful enough to be at the core of the biggest blogging system on the web (WordPress)! The language has the intensity to run large social networks. In addition, it is also easy enough to be a beginner’s first server side language!
What is a PHP File?
PHP files is another important PHP factor. They can contain text, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP code. Therefore, PHP code is also a PHP factor that is executed on the server. As a result, it is returned to the browser as plain HTML. PHP files have extension “.php”
What Can PHP Factors Do?
- PHP can generate dynamic page content
- It can create, open, read, write, delete, and close files on the server
- Also, it can collect form data
- In addition, it can send and receive cookies
- PHP can add, delete, modify data in your database
- It can be used to control user-access
- PHP can encrypt data
With PHP you are not limited to output HTML. You can output images, PDF files, and even Flash movies. You can also output any text, such as XHTML and XML.
Why PHP?
The following PHP factors opens the gateway to understand that PHP is vital part of internet development. PHP runs on various platforms (Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, etc.). Secondly, it is compatible with almost all servers used today (Apache, IIS, etc. Moreover, PHP supports a wide range of database. Furthermore, PHP is free. Download it from the official PHP resource: www.php.net. Lastly, PHP is easy to learn and runs efficiently on the server side
What’s new in PHP 7
- PHP 7 is much faster than the previous popular stable release (PHP 5.6)
- It has improved Error Handling
- Moreover, PHP 7 supports stricter Type Declarations for function arguments
- Also, it supports new operators (like the spaceship operator:
<=>)