PHP, particularly designed for the web, is a server-side scripting language that can be embedded into HTML. It resembles C and Perl in its general structure and programming rules. Developed by Rasmus Lerdorf, this language emerged from the desire to track people visiting his own website. Initially, Rasmus Lerdorf named this language "Personal Home Page" because he used it on his personal webpage. However, it was later renamed to "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor" to comply with GNU naming standards.

PHP can run on many operating systems; it is a platform-independent language. It can be executed on Linux with Apache Server and on Windows with IIS.

PHP expressions and functions can be written and executed within HTML documents. This allows the creation of dynamic web pages. When the web server encounters PHP expressions in a web page, it interprets and places their output among the HTML expressions.

What Can Be Done?

Like other server-side scripting languages, PHP can be used to create dynamic web pages. With its simple and understandable syntax and extensions, various tasks can be accomplished, including:

• database-connected applications
• dynamically generated graphics
• customized content or situations based on user, browser, and date
• surveys
• discussion forums
• e-commerce applications
• web-based email applications
• reading and creating XML data

Scripts performing such tasks can be written quickly. Additionally, apart from web applications, PHP can be used to write shell scripts for command-line operations. Although PHP is not widely used for writing shell scripts, it is continuously strengthened and developed by PHP developers with each new version. The PHP-CLI interface (interface that runs and interprets shell scripts from the command line) is being enhanced and developed with each new version.

PHP-GTK extension, one of the usage areas of PHP language, allows the creation of graphical user interfaces based on GTK (The GIMP Toolkit).