PHP Script

1. What is PHP?

PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language. Much of its syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in. The goal of the language is to allow web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly.

A nice introduction to PHP by Stig Sther Bakken can be found at http://www.zend.com/zend/art/intro.php on the Zend website. Also, much of the PHP Conference Material is freely available.

PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. This confuses many people because the first word of the acronym is the acronym. This type of acronym is called a recursive acronym. The curious can visit Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing for more information on recursive acronyms.

PHP/FI 2.0 is an early and no longer supported version of PHP. PHP 3 is the successor to PHP/FI 2.0 and is a lot nicer. PHP 4 is the current generation of PHP, which uses the Zend engine under the hood. PHP 5 uses Zend engine 2 which, among other things, offers many additional OOP features.

Yes. See the INSTALL file that is included in the PHP 4 source distribution.

There are a couple of articles written on this by the authors of PHP 4. Here's a list of some of the more important new features:

• Extended API module

• Generalized build process under Unix

• Generic web server interface that also supports multi-threaded web servers

• Improved syntax highlighter

• Native HTTP session support

• Output buffering support

• More powerful configuration system

• Reference counting