PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor)[1] is a reflective programming language originally designed for producing dynamic Web pages. PHP is used mainly in server-side application software, but can be used from a command line interface or in standalone graphical applications.
| PHP | |
|---|---|
| PHP | |
| Developer(s) | The PHP Group |
| Stable release | 5.2.0
/ November 2 2006 |
| Repository | |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | Scripting language |
| License | PHP License |
| Website | http://www.php.net/ |
PHP competes with Visual Basic and C++ as the third most popular programming language behind Java and C, based on world wide availability of practitioners, courses and vendors.[2] Available under the PHP License, PHP is an open source language and is considered to be free software by the Free Software Foundation.
History
PHP was written as a set of CGI binaries in the C programming language by the Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, to replace a small set of Perl scripts he had been using to maintain his personal homepage.[3] Lerdorf initially created PHP to display his résumé and to collect certain data, such as how much traffic his page was receiving. "Personal Home Page Tools" was publicly released on June 8 1995 after Lerdorf combined it with his own Form Interpreter to create PHP/FI.[4]
PHP 3
Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, two Israeli developers at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language's name to the recursive initialism "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor". The development team officially released PHP/FI 2 in November 1997 after months of beta testing. Public testing of PHP 3 began immediately and the official launch came in June 1998. Suraski and Gutmans then started a new rewrite of PHP's core, producing the Zend engine in 1999.[5] They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel, which actively manages the development of PHP.
PHP 4
In May 2000, PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released. The latest version as of September 2006 is 4.4.4. PHP 4 is currently still supported by security updates for those applications which require it.
PHP 5
On July 13 2004, PHP 5 was released, powered by Zend Engine II. PHP 5 included new features such as:[6]
- Robust support for Object-Oriented Programming (or OOP) through PHP Data Objects
- Performance enhancements taking advantage of the new engine
- Better support for MySQL through a completely rewritten extension
- Better XML support through a suite of interoperable tools
- Embedded support for SQLite
- Integrated SOAP support
- Data iterators
- Error handling through exceptions
The latest version as of November 2006 is PHP 5.2.0.
Usage
PHP generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating Web pages as output, but command-line scripting and client-side GUI applications are part of the three primary uses of PHP as well.
Server-side scripting
Originally designed to create dynamic web pages, PHP's principal focus is server-side scripting. While running the PHP parser with a web server and web browser, the PHP model can be compared to other server-side scripting languages such as Microsoft's ASP.NET system, Adobe ColdFusion, Sun Microsystems' JavaServer Pages, Zope, mod_perl and the Ruby on Rails framework, as they all provide dynamic content to the client from a web server. To more directly compete with the "framework" approach taken by these systems, Zend is working on the Zend Framework - an emerging (as of June 2006) set of PHP building blocks and best practices; other PHP frameworks along the same lines include CakePHP and Symfony.
The LAMP architecture has become popular in the Web industry as a way of deploying inexpensive, reliable, scalable, secure web applications. PHP is commonly used as the P in this bundle alongside Linux, Apache and MySQL. PHP can be used with a large number of relational database management systems, runs on all of the most popular web servers and is available for many different operating systems. This flexibility means that PHP has a wide installation base across the Internet; over 18 million Internet domains are currently hosted on servers with PHP installed.[7]
Examples of popular server-side PHP applications include phpBB, WordPress and MediaWiki.
Command-line scripting
PHP also provides a command line interface SAPI for developing shell and desktop applications, log parsing, or other system administration tasks. It is increasingly used on the command line for tasks which have traditionally been the ___domain of Perl, Python, awk, or shell scripting.
Client-side GUI applications
PHP provides bindings to GUI libraries such as GTK+ and text mode libraries like ncurses in order to facilitate development of a broader range of cross-platform GUI applications.
Syntax
PHP primarily acts as a filter which takes a file containing text and special PHP instructions and converts it to another form for display.
Here is a Hello World code example:
<?php echo 'Hello, World!'; ?>
PHP only parses code within its delimiters, such as <?php ?>. The delimiters <? and ?> are functionally identical, but this feature is dependent on the server's configuration. Anything outside its delimiters is sent directly to the output and not parsed by PHP. The example above is equivalent to the following text (and indeed is converted into this form):
Hello, World!
The primary use of this is to allow PHP statements to be embedded within HTML documents. PHP processes any delimited code in the page initially, thus handing the web server a file which consists entirely of HTML:
<?php //statements here ?> regular html here <? //more php statements ?>
Variables are prefixed with a dollar symbol and a type does not need to be specified in advance. Both double-quoted ("") and heredoc strings allow the ability to embed the variable's value into the string.
PHP treats new lines as whitespace, in the manner of a free-form language (except when inside string quotes). Statements are terminated by a semicolon, except in a few special cases.
PHP has three types of comment syntax: it allows multi-line comments using the /* */ construction as in C, and also allows comments which terminate at the end of the line using the // and # characters (as in C++ and Perl respectively).
Data types
PHP stores whole numbers in a platform-dependent range. This range is typically that of 32-bit signed integers. Integer variables can be assigned using decimal (positive and negative), octal and hexadecimal notations. Real numbers are also stored in a platform-specific range. They can be specified using floating point notation, or two forms of scientific notation.
PHP has a native Boolean type, named "boolean", similar to the native Boolean types in Java and C++. Using the Boolean type conversion rules, non-zero values can be interpreted as true and zero as false, as in Perl.
The null data type represents a variable that has no value. The only value in the null data type is NULL.
Arrays are heterogeneous, meaning a single array can contain objects of more than one type. They can contain any type that PHP can handle, including resources, objects, and even other arrays. Order is preserved in lists of values and in hashes with both keys and values, and the two can be intermingled.
Variables of the "resource" type represent references to resources from external sources. These are typically created by functions from a particular extension, and can only be processed by functions from the same extension. Examples include file, image and database resources.
Objects
Basic object-oriented functionality was added in PHP 3. However, handling of objects was completely rewritten for PHP 5, allowing for better performance and more features. In previous versions of PHP, objects were handled like primitive types. The drawback of this method was that semantically the whole object was copied when a variable was assigned, or passed as a parameter to a method. In the new approach, objects are referenced by handle, and not by value. PHP 5 introduced private and protected member variables and methods, along with abstract classes and abstract methods. It also introduced a standard way of declaring constructors and destructors similar to that of other object-oriented languages, such as C++, and an exception handling model similar to that of other programming languages.
The static method and class variable features in Zend Engine 2 do not work the way some expect. There is no virtual table feature in the engine, so the static variables are bound with a name at compile time instead of with a reference.
If the developer asks to create a copy of an object by using the reserved word clone, the Zend engine will check if a __clone() method has been defined or not. If not, it will call a default __clone() which will copy all of the object's properties. If a __clone() method is defined, then it will be responsible to set the necessary properties in the created object. For convenience, the engine will supply a function that imports all of the properties from the source object, so that they can start with a by-value replica of the source object, and only override properties that need to be changed.
Resources
Libraries
PHP includes a large number of free and open source libraries with the core build. PHP is a fundamentally Internet-aware system with modules built in for accessing FTP servers, many database servers, embedded SQL libraries like embedded MySQL and SQLite, LDAP servers, and others. Many functions familiar to C programmers such as the printf family are available in the standard PHP build.
PHP extensions have been written to add support for the Windows API, process management on Unix-like operating systems, multibyte strings (Unicode), cURL, and several popular compression formats. Some more unusual features include integration with Internet relay chat, and dynamic generation of images and Adobe Flash content. Some additional extensions are available via the PHP Extension Community Library.
Source code encoders and optimisers
As with many languages, PHP scripts are normally kept as human-readable source code, even on production webservers. While this allows flexibility, it can raise issues with security and performance.
Encoders offer some source code security and enable proprietary software by hindering source code reverse engineering. PHP scripts are compiled into native byte-code. The downside of this approach is that a special extension has to be installed on the server in order to run encoded scripts.
Optimisers offer dramatic performance gains by caching the compiled form of a PHP script in RAM (or disk) to avoid the overhead of parsing and compiling the code every time the script is run. They also restructure the code to provide performance gains. Both commercial (e.g. Zend Platform) and open source optimisers (xcache, eAccelerator, APC) are available.
Editors and IDEs
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. |
Information about PHP IDE.
Debuggers
APD- Advanced PHP Debugger.
xDebug- a PHP debugger and a profiler.
Templating engines
One popular templating engine is Smarty. And there is another one called TinyButStrong.
PEAR
The PHP Extension and Application Repository project is where you can find reusable components for PHP.
PEAR projects are usually written in PHP code under Object-oriented paradigm.
PECL
The PHP Extension and Community Library project is where you can find PHP extensions.
PECL extensions are written generally in C code, using Procedure-Oriented paradigm.
Support
PHP has a formal development manual that is maintained by the free software community. In addition, answers to most questions can often be found by doing a simple internet search. PHP users assist each other through various media such as chat, forums, newsgroups and PHP developer web sites. In turn, the PHP development team actively participates in such communities, garnering assistance from them in their own development effort (PHP itself) and providing assistance to them as well. There are many help resources available for the novice PHP programmer.
PHP is one of the most popular programming languages as of November 2006, ranked the 4th or the 5th among the many, only behind adoption of Java, C, and C++ while wrestling with Visual Basic according to a monthly statistic by TIOBE Software.
PHP can be deployed on any web server, or on almost every OS platform, with totally free of charge. PHP also provide complete source code for user to customize and extend for their own use. Compared with java, php is much easier for study, handy for deployment, while Microsoft's .net platform is considered strictly proprietary and costly.
Criticism
Criticisms of PHP include those general criticisms ascribed to other scripting programming languages and dynamically typed languages. Some specific criticisms of PHP include the following:
- PHP has traditionally inserted data received over the network directly into the language namespace ("register_globals"), leading to confusion between trusted and untrusted data, and hence innumerable security holes in PHP applications.
- PHP has traditionally used features such as "magic_quotes_gpc" and "magic_quotes_runtime" which attempt to escape apostrophes in strings in the assumption that they will be used in databases, to prevent SQL injection attacks. This leads to confusion over which data is escaped and which is not, and to problems when data is not in fact used as input to a database.
- PHP encourages programmers to output data directly into HTML pages without first encoding the data string as HTML. This leads to Cross-site scripting security holes appearing frequently in PHP applications.
- PHP does not have native support for Unicode or multibyte strings, making internationalization of PHP software difficult.
- PHP does not enforce the declaration of variables prior to their use, and variables which have not been initialized can have operations (such as concatenation) performed on them; an operation on an uninitialized variable raises an E_NOTICE level error, but this is hidden by default.
- PHP has no namespace support, with all PHP functions sharing the same global namespace.
- PHP's type checking is very loose, potentially causing problems. Variables in PHP are not really considered to have a type, in general.
- The standard function library lacks internal consistency. Many functions perform relatively similar actions and have different name standards and argument orders. For example, strpos($haystack, $needle) vs. in_array($needle, $haystack), and strcasecmp vs. stristr.
- Some PHP extensions use libraries that are not threadsafe, so rendering with Apache 2's Multi-Processing Module or Microsoft's IIS in ISAPI mode may cause crashes.[8]
Future development
PHP 6, in development as of October 2006, aims to address some of PHP 5's shortcomings.[9]
- Native Unicode support will be added;
- The magic_quotes option will be removed;
- The register_globals option will be removed;
- The safe_mode option will be removed.
In addition, there has been discussion of adding namespace support.
See also
Notes and references
- Kerner, Sean Michael (September 13, 2006). "Is PHP The Cure For The 'Broken' Web?". internetnews.com.
- Kerner, Sean Michael (October 31, 2006). "Microsoft Opens PHP Door". internetnews.com.
- Sweat, Jason E (2005). Guide to PHP Design Patterns. PHP|architect. ISBN 0-9735898-2-5.
- Alshanetsky, Ilia (2005). Guide to PHP Security. PHP|architect. ISBN 0-9738621-0-6.
- Shiflett, Chris (2005). Essential PHP Security. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 0-596-00656-X.
- Ullman, Larry (2003). PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites (1st Edition ed.). Peachpit Press. ISBN 0-321-18648-6.
{{cite book}}:|edition=has extra text (help)
- ^ "PHP:Introduction - Manual". Retrieved 2006-11-15.
- ^ http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm
- ^ Lerdorf, Rasmus (2006-09-15). "Re: There ARE other scriping languages besides PHP". Slashdot.org. Retrieved 2006-09-15.
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ Lerdorf, Rasmus (1995-06-08). "Announce: Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools)". Newsgroup: comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi. Retrieved 2006-09-17.
{{cite newsgroup}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ "Zend Engine version 2.0: Feature Overview and Design". Zend Technologies Ltd. Retrieved 2006-09-17.
- ^ http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2004/07/15/UpgradePHP5.html
- ^ http://www.php.net/usage.php
- ^ http://phplens.com/phpeverywhere/fastcgi-php
- ^ http://www.php.net/~derick/meeting-notes.html
External links
- PHP homepage
- Zend homepage - Instigators of modern PHP development, Zend PHP framework development, Zend Development Studio application
- comp.lang.php newsgroup
- Template:Dmoz – An active listing of PHP links.
- Patterns for PHPA pattern collection site.