Why Choose PHP?

Why Choose PHP?

There are some compelling reasons to work with PHP4. For many projects you will

find that the production process is significantly faster than you might expect if you

are used to working with other scripting languages. As an open source product,

PHP4 is well supported by a talented production team and a committed user

community. Furthermore, PHP can be run on all the major operating systems with

most servers.

Speed of Development

Because PHP allows you to separate HTML code from scripted elements, you will

notice a significant decrease in development time on many projects. In many

instances, you will be able to separate the coding stage of a project from the design

and build stages. Not only can this make life easier for you as a programmer, it also

can remove obstacles that stand in the way of effective and flexible design.

PHP Is Open Source

:

To many people, "open source" simply means free, which is, of course, a benefit in

itself. To quote from the official PHP site at http://www.php.net/:

This may sound a little foreign to all you folks coming from a non-UNIX

background, but PHP doesn't cost anything. You can use it for commercial and/or

non-commercial use all you want. You can give it to your friends, print it out and

hang it on your wall or eat it for lunch. Welcome to the world of Open Source

software! Smile, be happy, the world is good. For the full legalese, see the official

license.

Well-maintained open source projects offer users additional benefits, though. You

benefit from an accessible and committed community who offer a wealth of

experience in the subject. Chances are that any problem you encounter in your

coding can be answered swiftly and easily with a little research. If that fails, a

question sent to a mailing list can yield an intelligent, authoritative response.

You also can be sure that bugs will be addressed as they are found, and that new

features will be made available as the need is defined. You will not have to wait for

the next commercial release before taking advantage of improvements.

There is no vested interest in a particular server product or operating system. You

are free to make choices that suit your needs or those of your clients, secure that

your code will run whatever you decide.

Performance

Because of the powerful Zend engine, PHP4 compares well with ASP in benchmark

tests, beating it in some tests. Compiled PHP leaves ASP far behind.

Portability

PHP is designed to run on many operating systems and to cooperate with many

servers and databases. You can build for a UNIX environment and shift your work to

NT without a problem. You can test a project with Personal Web Server and install it

on a UNIX system running on PHP as an Apache module.

Summary

:

In this hour, we introduced PHP. You learned the history of PHP from a simple set of

macros to the powerful scripting environment it has become. You found out about

PHP4 and the Zend scripting engine, and how they incorporate new features and

more efficiency. Finally, you discovered some of the features that make PHP a

compelling choice as a Web programming language.

Q&A

Q Is PHP an easy language to learn?

In short, yes! You really can learn the basics of PHP in 24 hours. PHP provides an

enormous wealth of functions that allow you to do things for which you would have

to write custom code in other languages. PHP also handles data types and memory

issues for you (much like Perl).

Understanding the syntax and structures of a programming language is only the

beginning of the journey, however. Ultimately, you will only really learn by building

your own projects and by making mistakes. You should see this book as a starting

point.

Workshop

The Workshop provides quiz questions to help you solidify your understanding of the

material covered. Try to understand the quiz answers before continuing to the next

hour's lesson. Quiz answers are provided in Appendix A.

Quiz

What did the initials PHP originally stand for?

Who created the original version of PHP?

What is the name of the new scripting engine that powers PHP?

Name a new feature introduced with PHP4.

Activity

Flick through this book to get an idea of its structure. Think about the topics

covered and how they might help you with any future projects.