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When first introduced in 1994, PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page, but after rapidly growing in popularity due to it’s versatility, it is now known as the recursive acronym, Hypertext Preprocessor.
PHP is an open source scripting language which was initially designed for use in web development, but because of its ease of use and versatility (among many other advantages), the list of uses for PHP grows everyday. As a server-side scripting language, PHP’s scripts are executed on the server, as opposed to a client-side language like Javascript, where the scripts are executed by the browser, on the user’s computer.
As with any server-side language, all work completed by PHP is done behind the scenes – it can’t produce effects based on user interaction, such as rollover animations or drop down navigation. Because of this, sites which utilise PHP are often linked with CSS and/or Javascript, in order to produce web pages that neither language can produce alone.
So what does PHP do, exactly?
Essentially, PHP is used to allow the computer and server to interact with one another – by the time a web page has loaded, PHP has finished doing it’s job!
