PHP Web Development

PHP is a scripting language most commonly used for server side scripting as part of website development. Of the server side scripting languages available today PHP is likely the most popular with approximately 20 million websites hosted on servers supporting PHP due to its ability to support designing and deploying scalable, reliable, and secure web applications.

 

PHP operation

As PHP can be embedded in HTML, it generally runs on a webserver which takes the PHP source code as its input and generates a web page as output. In otherwords, the server-side processing of the PHP source allows the creation of a dynamic website with what is in essence a static source file. This is very similar to the dynamic server-side page generation provided by Microsoft ASP.

 

PHP, however, is an open source development language deployed on nearly all Linux servers today and is a critical component in the popular LAMP (Linux, Apache, mySQL, PHP) development suite. As with most open source projects, the group supporting PHP provides the complete source code for developers to build, customize and extend for their own purpose. The PHP community also provides a wealth of documentation and design assistance.

 

Criticisms of PHP Applications

Some will argue that the performance of PHP is lacking for general purpose computation, but this is not unlike the criticism of most scripting languages. Also the fact that PHP is similar in context to C and very easy for the first time user to begin working with, sometimes the groundwork is not put in place to determine an architecture that is able to grow along with the application.

 

Successful PHP Development

Counteracting the criticism posed by some against PHP applications, a good foundation for a scalable PHP application can be put in place by following certain guidelines:

- Think long-term and keep presentation, content and code separate

- Always keep security in mind

- Minimize the work required on the client side

- Of course, build for speed