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PHPExpand PHP

What is PHP?

  • originally stood for Personal Home Page, now it means PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
  • PHP is a server-side scripting language, like ASP
  • PHP scripts are executed on the server
  • PHP supports many databases (MySQL, Informix, Oracle, Sybase, Solid, PostgreSQL, Generic ODBC, etc.)
  • PHP is an open source software (OSS)
  • PHP is free to download and use

What is a PHP File?

  • PHP files may contain text, HTML tags and scripts
  • PHP files are returned to the browser as plain HTML 
  • PHP files have a file extension of ".php", ".php3", or ".phtml"
  • Your files must have an extension that the server knows to treat as a PHP document. The most common is .php, although others have included .php3, .php4, .phtml – we will use .php extension in this class.

What is MySQL?

  • MySQL is a small database server
  • MySQL is ideal for small and medium applications
  • MySQL supports standard SQL
  • MySQL compiles on a number of platforms
  • MySQL is free to download and use

PHP + MySQL

  • PHP combined with MySQL are cross-platform (means that you can develop in Windows and serve on a Unix platform)

Why PHP?

  • PHP runs on different platforms (Windows, Linux, Unix, etc.)
  • PHP is compatible with almost all servers used today (Apache, IIS, etc.)
  • PHP is FREE to download from the official PHP resource: www.php.net
  • PHP is easy to learn and runs efficiently on the server side

Where to Start?

  • Install an Apache server on a Windows or Linux machine
  • Install PHP on a Windows or Linux machine
  • Install MySQL on a Windows or Linux machine

Basic PHP Syntax

A PHP file normally contains HTML tags, just like an HTML file, and some PHP scripting code.
Below, we have an example of a simple PHP script which sends the text "Hello World" to the browser:

<html>
<body>
<?php echo "Hello World"; ?>
</body>
</html>

A PHP scripting block always starts with <?php and ends with ?>. A PHP scripting block can be placed anywhere in the document.
Each code line in PHP must end with a semicolon. The semicolon is a separator and is used to distinguish one set of instructions from another.
There are two basic statements to output text with PHP: echo and print. In the example above we have used the echo statement to output the text "Hello World".
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