PHP has been at the helm of the web for many years. It is an extremely popular, interpreted scripting language that is ideally suited for web development. This language powers millions of web sites on the net and is extremely well supported by its user community. It is released under a non-copyleft free software license / open source license. PHP can be deployed on most Web servers and also as a standalone shell on almost all operating systems and platforms.
The word “Preprocessor” means that PHP makes changes before the HTML page is created. The code is executed on the server, generating HTML which is then sent to the client. PHP therefore enables a static webpage to become dynamic. The language is dynamically typed and easy to use. PHP comes with many extensions offering all kinds of functionality from system operations to numerical processing. One of the reasons why PHP is so popular is that it is simple to learn for a newcomer to the language, but provides advanced features for professional developers. Other reasons for its popularity include its embedded relationship with HTML, it provides a good mix of performance and flexibility to developers, has a relatively shallow learning curve, easy to debug and good performance.