A non-technical introduction to PHP for budding web developers

As the title of the article suggests, the main goal of this article is to make ‘wanna be’ web developers aware of the immense potential and beauty of PHP – the most widely used language for website development. By using PHP, you can create beautiful, well-structured and manageable websites that can interact with its users and are therefore dynamic in nature. The ability to change content of the website, which is primary requirement for almost all websites that are created nowadays, is also a kid’s play for a PHP powered website. rnI hope you are aware of the fact that PHP is an acronym for Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter and was originally abbreviated as PHP/FI, because its founder Rasmus Lerdorf wrote it to maintain his personal homepage in the year 1994. After a lot of modifications, PHP has emerged as a highly potent server side scripting language and is powered by Zend Engine. The latest alpha version of the language is PHP 7 and if you are an advanced geek, then it’s possible that you have already downloaded it for giving it a try. rnAs mentioned earlier, PHP can also be used as a general purpose program language, although it is most popularly used to develop web applications. The reason behind the language’s high popularity among the web developers’ community is mainly because it can be seamlessly integrated and embedded with HTML – the primary requirement of the web. Although a standalone PHP script can also execute itself for giving the same result, embedding it in HTML is a standard practice for making the source code more readable. rnMoreover, the ability of the language to interact with databases, a common feature in dynamic websites, also makes PHP the darling of web developers. Not only that, the response cycle that goes on between a web server and a client machine is quite different for ‘only HTML’ websites and ‘PHP plus HTML’ websites. For websites that contains some PHP codes, the response is re-routed by a very powerful Zend Engine that resides on the web server. rnA striking advantage of PHP is that it is a server-side scripting language, which implies that it consumes the resources of the web server for its execution. On the other hand, languages like JavaScript are client-side languages and consume the resources of the client’s machine or the local host, as it is commonly called in the technical parlance. Therefore, by using PHP, one can make use of the hardware of the server and the kernel of the operating system running on it. It also adds to the security of the websites, thus making it difficult for hackers to break into the web pages and databases of a website. rnSince web servers or as a matter of fact, any server in this world generally contains more powerful hardware and more robust, stable operating system kernels managed by skilled professionals, the quality of the result produced by an executable PHP code can literally create magic. For example, let us discuss a simple case where we want to put a condition within the source code that will display ‘Good Morning’ at the home page of the website if the server time is less than 12 o’clock in the noon and ‘Welcome’, if the time has exceeded the limit. rnNow, with simple HTML, the time of the server can never be accessed and the visitor of the website will see a pale ‘Welcome’ any time he visits it. Complex conditions like setting an appropriate welcome message by accessing the time, date and geo-location of the visitor can also be framed quite easily using PHP, thus making it responsive and fun for the visitors.rnNo wonder, any website development company worth its salt will have a brilliant team of experienced PHP programmers. In fact, PHP has emerged as the key skill that a web development company seeks while recruiting programmers. Therefore, if you want to be a good website developer, you better start learning PHP before it gets late. Rest assured, you will be rewarded handsomely if you can develop skills in PHP and server-side scripting.