Web technologies.From PHP to Python - Essay Example

The distinguishing factor of PHP from client-side languages like JavaScript is that the code is executed on the server. If you were to have a script similar to the above on your server, the client would receive the results of running that script, with no way of determining what the underlying code may be. You can even configure your web server to process all your HTML files with PHP, and then there's really no way that users can tell what you have up your sleeve. (See: http://www.php net/manual/en/introduction.php) The best things in using PHP are that it is extremely simple for a newcomer, but offers many advanced features for a professional programmer.

Don't be afraid reading the long list of PHP's features. You can jump in, in a short time, and start writing simple scripts in a few hours.Almost anything. PHP is primarily focused on server-side scripting, so you can do anything a CGI program can do, such as collect form data, generate dynamic page content, or send and receive cookies. But PHP can do much more.Server-side scripting: This is the most traditional and main target field for PHP. We need three things to make this work. The PHP parser (CGI or server module), a web server and a web browser.

We need to run the web server, with a connected PHP installation. We can access the PHP program output with a web browser, viewing the PHP page through the server. All these can run on our home machine if we are just experimenting with PHP programming. Command line scripting: We can make a PHP script to run it without any server or browser. We only need the PHP parser to use it this way. This type of usage is ideal for scripts regularly executed using cron (on *nix or Linux) or Task Scheduler (on Windows).

These scripts can also be used for simple text processing tasks. Writing desktop applications: PHP is probably not the very best language to create a desktop application with a graphical user interface, but if we know PHP very well, and would like to use some advanced PHP features in our client-side applications you can also use PHP-GTK to write such programs. You also have the ability to write cross-platform applications this way. PHP-GTK is an extension to PHP, not available in the main distribution.

What they use it for practical implementation issues (See: http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro-whatcando.php) PHP can be used on all major operating systems, including Linux, many Unix variants (including HP-UX, Solaris and OpenBSD), Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, RISC OS, and probably others. PHP has also support for most of the web servers today. This includes Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server, Personal Web Server, Netscape and iPlanet servers, Oreilly Website Pro server, Caudium, Xitami, OmniHTTPd, and many others.

For the majority of the servers PHP has a module, for the others supporting the CGI standard, PHP can work as a CGI processor. So with PHP, we have the freedom of choosing an operating system and a web server. Furthermore, we also have the choice of using procedural programming or object oriented programming, or a mixture of them. Although not every standard OOP feature is implemented in PHP 4, many code libraries and large applications (including the PEAR library) are written only using OOP code.

PHP 5 fixes the OOP related weaknesses of PHP 4, and introduces a complete object model.