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.