What is PHP language?

After a long history of PHP development, many users are familiar with the PHP language. Here I will share my personal understanding and discuss it with you. Those who are more interested in the Internet, especially those who are interested in website construction technology, may have heard of PHP. PHP is a simple but powerful programming language designed to dynamically create HTML content.

PHP itself is a simple and powerful language. PHP has core features such as powerful string and array processing capabilities, and greatly improved support for Object-Oriented Programming (PHP5 and later versions ). Using standard and optional extension modules, PHP applications can connect to more than a dozen databases such as MySQL or Oracle, draw, create PDF files, and create parsed XML files. You can also use the C language to write your own PHP extension module. For example, provide a PHP interface function in an existing code library. You can also run PHP In Windows, use COM to control other Windows applications such as Word and Excel, or Use ODBC to connect to the database.

In China, PHP is a commonly used network programming language. ASP3.0 has already been abandoned by Microsoft and will not be updated any more. Some people may think that PHP should also be something that will soon become a new thing, right?

However, on the contrary, PHP is not only developing rapidly, but also leaving ASP far behind. It is gradually becoming the most widely used and popular language on the Internet.

According to the Netcraft Website Survey (http://www.netcraft.com), more than 23 million servers are currently using PHP globally (the world's top 1/4 websites, including around 0.1 billion of all static websites ). According to Netcraft data, PHP has developed rapidly this year, and the growth momentum is strong. According to the world's most popular programming language rankings tibench (http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm), PHP ranked top five.

According to the data provided in note 1 of Programming PHP, the number of developers using PHP programs in the world has reached 2.5 million. The Development Team of the PHP language itself is also very large. At present, there are more than 450 developers who submit more than 1 million lines of code through CVS. The PHP community is the most active development community in the world. Tens of millions of people share code, promote PHP language, help each other, and build many well-known projects. In fact, in the world

The "LAMP" (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) technology combination is now the most popular WEB technology combination. Because these software is free of charge, anyone using LAMP can set up a personal or commercial site of their own for free. In addition, these software are open source code. You can easily download the code written by others and install it on your own website.

Of course, PHP can not only run on Linux, but in fact PHP supports all mainstream operating systems, such as Windows and various Unix systems. Most Chinese users use Windows operating systems, and even the server market is also a Windows system (which is rare in the world ). In Windows, PHP can also work well with the IIS server. Microsoft has recently signed an agreement with Zend to increase support for PHP in Windows Server 2003 and its future versions Longhorn.

Simple is the reason for making PHP so successful. Simplicity equals a small amount of code and a short development cycle. Developers and companies often can use PHP to complete projects in a short time, and using other languages may take several times.

As Adam Bosworth of Google said:

"In the world of programming, there is an unrecognized war every day. It is a war between ordinary people and computer scientists. It is a war between people who want to write code in a simple, flexible, and humane way and who want to write code in a clean, clear, and correct way. It is a war between PHP and C ++/Java ."

The future of PHP is bright. Currently, major platform vendors such as MicroSoft, IBM, Oracle, MySQL, Intel, and RedHat all recognize and support PHP. Zend has joined several leading companies and members of the PHP community to initiate a new Collaboration Project, the purpose is to bring PHP to a new level by creating an enterprise-level, standardized Web application development framework and development environment. The main content of this project is Zend PHP Framework and Eclipse php ide.

Although there is a huge gap between PHP penetration rates in China and developed countries in Europe and the US, PHP will develop rapidly in China with the popularity of the new network boom and open source culture. We believe that more people will understand open source, PHP, and PHP will play a more important role in China's Internet construction.