“When I started writing this article, I promised myself I
wouldn’t editorialize or evangelize the usage of PHP. Instead, I’d
just write a nice little article about this cool server-side
scripting language that’s currently used on over 1.4 million web
servers. I wasn’t going to go on about the blazingly fast parsing
engine in PHP4, or its database connectivity functions. I wasn’t
going to discuss the XML support, Java servlet support, native
session handling and IMAP functions. Most of all, I wasn’t planning
to enter into the “open source vs. commercial software” debate, and
tell you about the hard-working group of developers working day and
night to add functionality and upgrades, based purely on user
responses and requests.”
“But it would be just silly of me not to mention all of that.
Since version 3 (we’re now to the first official release of version
4.0.0), PHP has proven to be a viable and stable solution for
everything from personal to corporate to E-commerce web sites, and
not just for me, but for thousands of developers worldwide….”
“PHP can do anything you want, except sit on its head and
spin. With a little on-the-fly image manipulation and DHTML, it can
probably do that, too. If you’re coming over to the PHP world
from another language, I promise that you can pick it up in no
time: the syntax borrows from Perl, C and Java, so if you have even
the most basic understanding of programming languages, your first
PHP project will be a breeze.”