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Why use PHP?
Why Do We Write in PHP
Dynamic web applications in a dynamically advancing world
During the last few years, dynamic web applications have become as commonplace as cellular phones, palm-size computers and laser shows. These hitherto unimaginable things have ceased to be amazing. We have simply got accustomed to them. Now, visitors to e-shops or web portals think about inner mechanisms of these online facilities just as much as a teenage boy troubles his mind about radio wave theories while chatting to his girlfriend over his first cellular phone – not much!
The birth of PHP
As more and more commercial, charitable and educational organisations sought to develop and maintain sites containing dynamic client-server functionality, cheap and functional solutions became commercially viable. Web communities that had no financial goals also wished for full-featured sites with, say, chat or forum functionality. These solutions needed to cost little and be implemented quickly. All this required a new development technology, that would:
be free or, at least, affordable;
be easily learned;
allow an administrator to support a site without too much effort, and
provide good application performance.
As usual, the new demands were quickly satisfied. In 1994, the world unwittingly survived something that was destined to grow into PHP. It was a collection of open-source Perl scripts written by Rasmus Lerdorf, a secluded genius from Disko, an island of Greenland. He did it for his personal use, and he never expected so much interest to arise when the world web development society examined his package. This overworked Disko-tech had to hone his scripts further to fix an infestation of bugs and improve performance. Before long, PHP was completely rewritten in C.
http://www.developer.com/lang/php/
article.php/900521
More PHP history
In 1998, PHP was released in its 3rd version. By that time, it turned into a respectable web development tool that could compete with similar products that had kept busy IT giants such as Microsoft (ASP) and SUN (Java, JSP).
At the same time, it was still free (licensed as open source) and easy to learn.1. These are some of the factors that helped PHP to find millions of exponents within a short period of time. It now goes without saying that if you want a website but are short of time or money, the easiest way for you to get going would be to look for a PHP specialist to develop your site for you.
PHP is not without its critics – but what does this mean?
Galileo Galilei, Garry Kasparov and Michael Schumacher are all victims of criticism from one source or another in their respective times, regardless of their achievements. Likewise, there is no technology that can escape critical misgivings and be named ‘the best’ and be universally acknowledged as such, and PHP is of course no exception. Technology should always be chosen according to priorities.
The Magic Web team has been practising web programming for several years and is skilled in all major technologies. However, we choose PHP when a negotiated project is to be done fast but functionality is at a premium. Our thoroughly tested solutions, such as the framework speed up the development yet more, and as time goes by the reliability of the products improves. Our framework compensates for PHP’s main imperfection: its awkward realisation of object-oriented programming principles and concepts. This disadvantage often stops those who consider the possibility of making PHP their prevailing development tool. We, too, would choose Java when the project in question is large scale, or when it needs the implementation of a sophisticated business logic. But corporate web sites, web portals or simple e-shops compiled out of numerous ready-made and reliable solutions scattered over the Internet comprise our PHP sector.
The amount of positive feedback we get disproves the widely-held belief that PHP is not a tool for respectable commercial applications. And let’s not forget that PHP is the best choice for charities and educational organisations that prefer free hosting services, as PHP is commonly included in hosting packages, and doesn’t require too much effort from system administrators.
Why is it good?
PHP is naturally compatible with all operating systems. It works fine on personal computers that were regarded as cutting edge about four years ago but that now show their age running some modern application. And it is ideal for web programming novices, as all the main concepts (such as client-server communication, GET and POST requests and Hypertext Preprocessors) are learned the moment you start reading the PHP help documentation.
PHP’s creators developed an infrastructure that allows experienced C programmers to extend PHP’s abilities. Due to this, PHP now supports such advanced technologies as XML, XSL, and COM.
Programmers who write for the web face the necessity of database engine handling almost daily. PHP is naturally compatible with MySQL (www.mysql.com), which is one of the most popular database engines, but it can be used with any existing database engine. Like PHP, MySQL is free, provides high performance, and is available with any hosting package.
Our own experience in PHP-based web development is the background for our firm intention to go on using this dynamically growing technology. When numerous net experts predict that PHP’s popularity will increase for years to come, what is the point in remaining aloof?
http://asia.cnet.com/itmanager/
tech/0,39006407,39139343,00.htm
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1 It is widely believed that a complete novice in programming will write acceptable code after 3 to 4 days of learning PHP, while an experienced developer familiar with C++, Java or Perl will do well with PHP in a few hours
This article re-produced with kind permission from
Magic Web Solutions Ltd.
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