Introduction of PHP

PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development.

What is PHP?

It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and first released in 1995.

Stable released version 8.3.2 in 18 January 2024.

• PHP is an acronym for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor"
• PHP is a widely-used, open source scripting language.
• PHP scripts are executed on the server.
• PHP is free to download and use.

What is a PHP file?

• PHP files can contain text, css, javascript, and php code.
• PHP files have extension ".php"
• PHP code is executed on the server, and the result is returned to the browser as plain HTML.

How to run PHP first program

• Go to htdocs folder inside xampp folder server
• Create new project name
• In project folder add home.php file
• Open xampp server control panel
• click to start apache server
• now open any browser and type localhost
• now type localhost/projectname/home.php
• click enter to run.

What can PHP do?

• PHP can generate dynamic page content
• PHP can collect form data
• PHP can send and receive cookies
• PHP can be used to control user-access
• PHP can encrypt data

Features of MySQL

• PHP runs on various platforms (windows, linux, unix, mac OS etc)
• PHP is compatible with almost all servers used today (apache, IIS, etc)
• PHP supports a wide range of databases.
• PHP is easy to learn and runs efficiently on the server side.

What is new in PHP 8.3.3

PHP 8.3 is a major update of the PHP language. It contains many new features, such as explicit typing of class constants, deep-cloning of readonly properties and additions to the randomness functionality. As always it also includes performance improvements, bug fixes, and general cleanup.