An introductory lecture on PHP

1. PHP: An Introduction
PAUL LUCKY BWAROMALE

2. What is PHP?
 PHP originally stands Personal Home Page, but now PHP Hypertext
Processor after its standardization and licensing.
 A server sided scripting language for providing dynamic contents for
web pages based on a client request.

3. Features of PHP
 A HLL interpreted scripting language.
 Runs on its default Linux Apache server
 Built-in session management
 Built-in functions and functions management.
 Support for HTML tags
 Fully fledged OOP i.e. PDO
 Portability: Compatible with different database systems
 Open Source
 File extension of .php

4. Brief History and Evolution
Developed as a means of monitoring page views by Rasmus Lerdorf
on his online resume in 1994 called PHP/FI
The original PHP/FI otherwise called PHP 1 has been reviewed a
couple of times.
The present version is called PHP 7 which has full OOP features
and support for different databases and engines.
PHP is currently moving away from scripting to a fully fledged
software development tool, as some of its legacy functions are
being dropped gradually to enable software development.

5. Examples of websites that run/support
PHP
 Facebook
 Yahoo
 Joomla
 Wordpress

6. Structure of a PHP program
All php scripts starts with <? Or <?php
Ends with ?>
e.g <?php
echo “PHP”;
?>

7. Variable declaration in PHP
All variables in PHP starts with the ‘$’ sign.
e.g. $kobo = 100;