What is PHP?

• PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages.
• PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. The main implementation of PHP is now produced by The PHP Group and serves as the de facto standard for PHP as there is no formal specification.
• While PHP originally stood for "Personal Home Page", it is now said to stand for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor", a recursive acronym.
• PHP is a server-side scripting language, like Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP). PHP scripts are executed on the server.
• PHP files can contain text, HTML tags and scripts. PHP files are returned to the browser as plain HTML. PHP files have a file extension of ".php", ".php3", or ".phtml"
• PHP supports many databases (MySQL, Informix, Oracle, Sybase, Solid, PostgreSQL, Generic ODBC, etc.)
• PHP is an open source software. PHP is free to download and use. PHP can be deployed on most web servers and as a standalone interpreter, on almost every operating system and platform free of charge.