What Is PHP? PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, a recursive acronym. It is mainly a Web server side scripting language. But it can also be used for other purposes.
PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995 as a simple Web page generation tool named as PHP/FI (Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter). Today it becomes the number one of server side scripting languages.
Main features of PHP:
   * Cookies - PHP transparently supports HTTP cookies.
   * Sessions - PHP supports sessions to allow you to preserve certain data across subsequent accesses.
   * Connection handling - PHP maintains a connection in 3 possible states: NORMAL, ABORTED, and TIMEOUT.
   * Using remote files - PHP allows you to open remote files with Internet protocols like HTTP or FTP.
   * Persistent Database Connections - PHP supports persistent connections to database servers.
   * File uploads - PHP allows Web users to upload single or multiple files.
   * Safe mode - PHP supports a safe mode with many built-in functions restricted or disabled.
   * Command line - PHP supports many command line options.