What is PHP?

PHP is a server-side, HTML-embedded scripting language. PHP distinguishes other like client JavaScript where its code executes on the server side. What can PHP do?
At its lowest level, PHP can do anything other CGI programs can do, such as collecting tabular data, generating dynamic page content, or sending and receiving cookies. Perhaps the most powerful and meaningful feature is that PHP supports a wide range of databases. Writing a Web page that supports a database is incredibly simple.
The following databases are currently supported:
Adabas D InterBase Solid
DBase mSQL Sybase
Empress MySQL Velocis
Filepro Oracle Unix dbm
Informix PostgreSQL
PHP also supports "conversations" with other services, such as IMAP, SNMP, NNTP, POP3, and even HTTP. You can also turn on obscure network interfaces and other protocol interactions.
A Brief History of PHP
In the fall of 1994, Rasmus Lerdorf began to conceive PHP. The early non-release version was used on his homepage to track who was looking at his online resume. The first version came out in early 1995, when PHP was only considered a personal homepage development tool. It consists of a very simple analysis engine with only a few special macros to understand and some tools that are common to the back end of the home page. Like a guest book, Counter and something else. The parser was rewritten in 1995 and named Php/fi Second Edition. FI is another package written by Rasmus that explains the HTML form of data. He combines the Personal Homepage tool script and the form parser, plus msql support. This creates a php/fi. Php/fi grew at an astonishing pace and people began to contribute to it with their own code.
It is difficult to give its hard statistics, but it can be estimated that at the end of 1996, there are at least 15,000 sites in the world using Php/fi. By 1997, the figure was over 50,000. And at this time the development of PHP has also changed. Projects developed by Rasmus's own favoured and several people become a more organized group achievement. Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrite the parser. This new parser is the foundation of PHP version 3. Many useful code inherits from Php/fi to PHP3, and many are completely rewritten.
Today (1999) either PHP/FI or PHP3 are bundled with many commercial products, such as C2-level Web servers and Red Hat Linux. According to data from Netcraft, it is estimated that more than 150,000 web sites have been used worldwide for PHP applications. It seems to be more than the site of Netscape's flagship enterprise server running on the Internet.