PHP

Also known as: PHP Hypertext Preprocessor

PHP is a server-side programming language that can be executed by Web servers to generate dynamic Web sites. A variety of operations can be performed within the scripting language, such as retrieving and editing information stored in a database. The result is usually an HTML document that is then displayed in a visitor's browser.

PHP is widely used by CMS systems and for driving dynamic websites such as discussion forums, web shops and weblogs. For data storage, PHP-based Web sites and Web applications often use database systems such as MySQL or MariaDB.

In order for PHP scripts to be uploaded to and executed by the Web server, it must have support for PHP. This is standard with many hosting providers, especially if Web servers have an open source operating system based on Linux. PHP scripts have the extension .php. When using friendly URLs, it is not visible. Only the code that generates the script is visible to the visitor.

Other serverside scripting languages include ASP (Active Server Page), JSP(Java Server Page), Python and ColdFusion.

Abbreviation PHP

PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page. The language was initially developed for controlling simple personal homepages. As the language evolved, the explanation no longer covered it. With version 3.0, the meaning of PHP was changed to a recursive acronym: PHP Hypertext Preprocessor.