What does PHP stand for in coding web pages on the Internet?
PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. It’s a recursive acronym, meaning the first letter (P) stands for the term itself.
PHP originally was an acronym for Personal Home Page, in the early stages of development. When PHP 3.0 was released in 1998 Hypertext Preprocessor was officially adopted. At this point PHP was evolving from a simple set of tools for personal home pages to a full server side scripting language for web development.
PHP is a server side scripting language that is embedded with HTML to build dynamic web pages. By server side I mean that PHP code is parsed on the web server. Then the result of this is delivered to the web browser, building the web page. You do not see the PHP source code on a web page, but the result of the processing (HTML).
Some other highlights:
- Rasmus Lerdorf created the scripting language in 1994.
- PHP can be installed on different operating systems – Linux, Unix, Windows , Max OS and run on different web servers (Apache, IIS…)
- PHP can be written as procedural programming and object oriented programming.
- PHP can “talk” to many types of databases by using database extensions, abstraction layers or ODBC.
You can learn more about PHP here.
Server side programming turns a static site into a dynamic website. By this I mean rather than just looking at text and images on a page that does not change, users can interact with the page to do something and get a result.
Benefits of PHP
The main benefit of PHP in web development is that you can build in functionality that you can not do with HTML alone. Connecting PHP to a web database opens the door to build web applications rather than just “web pages” of text and images.
With PHP programming, you can do things like.
- search information in a database
- send email
- submit a contact form
- manage data stored in a database.
To sum it up, what PHP stands for is trivial, but the benefits of PHP are significant. You can code just about any functionality into a website, it’s an affordable option for web development, and it’s not difficult to learn.
- PHP is open source – which means it is free to use. Because of this, there is a huge amount of websites built using PHP and there are a huge amount of web developers that use PHP
- PHP is not difficult learn. Again, because it is easy to learn, there is a large amount of people to use it. This means, a large user community and much documentation on the subject.
- PHP is highly customizable.
I have been coding websites with PHP since 2000 and have been a freelance PHP developer for over 20 years. View examples of websites I have built with PHP or if you need to hire a PHP developer, contact me.