What is PHP?

PHP is a scripting language designed largely for the web environment. PHP has gained quite a following in recent times, and it is one of the forerunners in the Open Source software movement. Its similarity to C, speed and simplicity drives its success. PHP is currently divided into two major versions: PHP 4 and PHP 5. PHP 6 is currently under development.

PHP allows a static web document to become dynamic. "PHP" is a recursive acronym that stands for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor". PHP preprocesses (that is, PHP processes before the output is sent to the browser) hypertext documents. Because of this, the pages can change before the user sees them, based on conditions. This can be used to write something to the page, create a table with a number of rows, or integrate the web page with a web database, such as MySQL.